nere  in  small  compass7eh*4ched  with  under 
standing,  is  the  story  of  the  great  hero  of 
mass  production.  In  the  first,  fateful  decades 
of  this  century  Ford  evolved  a  cheap  standard 
ized  car  that  transformed  American  life  in  city 
and  country  and  called  into  existence  new 
industries,  new  roads,  a  new  mechanically 
minded  generation.  The  relentless  technical 
rationalization  that  made  this  possible  excited 
the  wonder— and  emulation— of  the  world. 
Ford's  greatest  innovation— the  mo.ving  as 
sembly  line— raised  human  productivity  to 
heights  undreamed  of. 

The  life  of  this  lonely,  unlettered,  contra 
dictory  genius  was  as  lengendary  as  his  ac 
complishment.  Burlingame  describes  Ford's 
early  days  on  a  Michigan  farm,  his  dogged 
attempts  in  a  Detroit  woodshed,  the  desperate 
need  of  funds  that  drove  him  into  automobile 
racing.  He  describes  the  formation  of  the  Ford 
company,  its  struggles  and  reversals,  the  law 
suits,  the  crises,  the  adjustments  and  advances. 
He  discusses  the  powerful  personalities  that 
Ford  attracted  to  himself,  the  internal  dissen 
sions  in  the  company,  the  controversial  labor 
policy,  Ford's  benefactions  and  blind  spots, 
his  family  life,  his  square-dances,  his  fling  at 
politics.  Burlingame  has  shown  all  sides  of 
this  light-lipped,  intuitive  man  and  all  phases 
of  hrs  career,  which  changed  the  world.  J 


C.  Paul  Thompson 


HENRY  FORD 


FOREWORD 

BY  ROSE  WILDER  LANE 

FIFTY-TWO  years  ago  *  a  few  farmers'  families 
near  Greenfield,  Michigan,  heard  that  there  was 
another  baby  at  the  Fords' — a  boy.  Mother  and 
son  were  doing  well.  They  were  going  to  name 
the  boy  Henry. 

Twenty-six  years  later  a  little  neighborhood 
on  the  edge  of  Detroit  was  amused  to  hear  that 
the  man  Ford  who  had  just  built  the  little  white 
house  on  the  corner  had  a  notion  that  he  could 
invent  something.  He  was  always  puttering 
away  in  the  old  shed  back  of  the  house.  Some 
times  he  worked  all  night  there.  The  neighbors 
saw  the  light  burning  through  the  cracks. 

Twelve  years  ago  half  a  dozen  men  in  Detroit 
were  actually  driving  the  Ford  automobile  about 
the  streets.  Ford  had  started  a  small  factory, 
with  a  dozen  mechanics,  and  was  buying  ma 
terial.  It  was  freely  predicted  that  the  venture 
would  never  come  to  much. 

Last  year  —  January,  1914  —  America  was 
startled  by  an  announcement  from  the  Ford  fac 
tory  that  ten  million  dollars  would  be  divided 

*July  30,  1863. 

iii 


iv  FOREWORD 

among  the  eighteen  thousand  employees  as  their 
share  of  the  company's  profits.  Henry  Ford  was 
a  multimillionaire,  and  America  regarded  him 
with  awe. 

Mankind  must  have  its  hero.  The  demand  for 
him  is  more  insistent  than  hunger,  more  inex 
orable  than  cold  or  fear.  Before  a  race  builds 
houses  or  prepares  food  with  its  hands,  it  creates 
in  its  mind  that  demigod,  that  superman,  stand 
ing  on  a  higher  plane  than  the  rest  of  humanity, 
more  admirable,  more  powerful  than  the  others. 
We  must  have  him  as  a  symbol  of  something 
greater  than  ourselves,  to  keep  alive  in  us  that 
faith  in  life  which  is  threatened  by  our  own  ex 
perience  of  living. 

He  is  at  once  our  greatest  solace  and  our  worst 
enemy.  We  cling  to  him  as  a  child  clings  to  a 
guiding  hand,  unable  to  walk  without  it,  and  never 
able  to  walk  alone  until  it  is  let  go.  Every  ad 
vance  of  democracy  destroys  our  old  hero,  and 
hastily  we  build  up  another.  When  science  has 
exorcised  Jove,  and  real  estate  promoters  have 
subdivided  the  Olympian  heights,  we  desert  the 
old  altars  to  kneel  before  thrones.  WThen  our 
kings  have  been  cast  down  from  their  high  places 
by  our  inconsistent  struggles  for  liberty,  we  can 
not  leave  those  high  places  empty.  We  found 
a  government  on  the  bold  declaration,  "All  men 
are  born  free  and  equal,"  but  we  do  not  believe 
it.  Out  of  the  material  at  hand  we  must  create 
again  our  great  ones. 


FOREWORD  v 

So,  with  the  growth  of  Big  Business  during 
the  last  quarter  of  a  century,  we  have  built  up 
the  modern  myth  of  the  Big  Business  Man. 

Our  imaginations  are  intrigued  by  the  spec 
tacle  of  his  rise  from  our  ranks.  Yesterday  he 
was  a  farmer's  son,  an  office  boy,  a  peddler  of 
Armenian  laces.  To-day  he  is  a  demigod.  Is 
our  country  threatened  with  financial  ruin?  At 
a  midnight  conference  of  his  dependents,  hastily 
called,  he  speaks  one  word.  We  are  saved.  Does 
a  foreign  nation,  fighting  for  its  life,  ask  our 
help?  He  endorses  the  loan. 

We  contemplate  him  with  awe.  In  one  life 
time  he  has  made  himself  a  world  power;  in 
twenty  years  he  has  made  a  hundred  million  dol 
lars,  we  say.  He  is  a  Big  Business  Man. 

Our  tendency  was  immediately  to  put  Henry 
Ford  in  that  class.  He  does  not  belong  to  it.  Fie 
is  not  a  Big  Business  Man;  he  is  a  big  man  in 
business. 

It  is  not  strange,  with  this  belief  of  millions 
of  persons  that  the  men  who  have  been  at  the 
head  of  our  great  business  development  are 
greater  than  ordinary  men,  that  most  of  them 
believe  it  themselves  and  act  on  that  assump 
tion.  Henry  Ford  does  not.  His  greatness  lies 
in  that. 

With  millions  piling  upon  millions  in  our 
hands,  most  of  us  would  lose  our  viewpoint.  He 
has  kept  his — a  plain  mechanic's  outlook  on  life 
and  human  relations.  He  sees  men  all  as  parts 


vi  FOREWORD 

of  a  great  machine,  in  which  every  waste  mo 
tion,  every  broken  or  inefficient  part  means  a 
loss  to  the  whole. 

"Money  doesn't  do  me  any  good"  he  says.  ffl 
can't  spend  it  on  myself.  Money  has  no  value, 
anyway.  It  is  merely  a  transmitter,  like  elec 
tricity.  I  try  to  keep  it  moving  as  fast  as  I  can, 
for  the  best  interests  of  everybody  concerned.  A 
man  can't  afford  to  look  out  for  himself  at  the 
expense  of  any  one  else,  because  anything  that 
hurts  the  other  man  is  bound  to  hurt  you  in  the 
end,  tlie  same  way.3' 

The  story  of  Henry  Ford  is  the  story  of  his 
coming  to  that  conclusion,  and  of  his  building 
up  an  annual  business  of  one  hundred  and  fifty 
million  dollars  based  upon  it. 


CONTENTS 

PAGB 

FOREWORD iii 

CHAPTER 

I.  ONE  SUMMER'S  DAY                        ,        .  i 

II.  MENDING  A  WATCH  .        .        .        .        •  7 

III.  THE  FIRST  JOB .14 

W.  AN  EXACTING  ROUTINE                  ,        .  20 

V.  GETTING  THE  MACHINE  IDEA  .        .        .  26 

VI.  BACK  TO  THE  FARM 33 

VII.  THE  ROAD  TO  HYMEN      ....  40 

yill.  MAKING  A  FARM  EFFICIENT    ...  46 

IX.  THE  LURE  OF  THE  MACHINE  SHOPS      .  52 

X.  "WHY  NOT  USE  GASOLINE?"  ...  57 

XL  BACK  TO  DETROIT 63 

XII.  LEARNING  ABOUT  ELECTRICITY        .        .  69 

XIII.  EIGHT  HOURS,  BUT  NOT  FOR  HIMSELF  .  74 

XIV.  STRUGGLING  WITH  THE  FIRST  CAR        .  80 
XV.  A  RIDE  IN  THE  RAIN      ....  86 

XVI.  ENTER  COFFEE  JIM 92 

XVII.  ANOTHER  EIGHT  YEARS  ....      98 

XVIII.  WINNING  A  RACE 104 

XIX.  RAISING  CAPITAL     .  .        .        .no 

XX.    CLINGING  TO  A  PRINCIPLE      .        .        .116 
rii 


viii  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGH 

XXI.  EARLY  MANUFACTURING  TRIALS  .        .  122 

XXII.  AUTOMOBILES  FOR  THE  MASSES     .        .  129 

XXIII.  FIGHTING  THE  SELDON  PATENT  .        .  135 

XXIV.  "THE  GREATEST  GOOD  TO  THE  GREATEST 

NUMBER" 141 

XXV.  FIVE  DOLLARS  A  DAY  MINIMUM  .        .  147 

XXVI.  MAKING  IT  PAY 154 

XXVII.  THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  A  JOB  .        .        .  161 

XXVIII.  A  GREAT  EDUCATIONAL  INSTITUTION    .  167 

XXIX.  THE  EUROPEAN  WAR  ....  173 

XXX.  THE  BEST  PREPAREDNESS      .        .        .179 


HENRY  FORD'S  OWN 
STORY 


CHAPTER  I 
ONE  SUMMER'S  DAY 

IT  was  a  hot,  sultry  day  in  the  last  of  July, 
one  of  those  Eastern  summer  days  when  the  air 
presses  heavily  down  on  the  stifling  country  fields, 
and  in  every  farmyard  the  chickens  scratch  deep 
on  the  shady  side  of  buildings,  looking  for  cool 
earth  to  lie  upon,  panting. 

'This  weather  won't  hold  long,"  William 
Ford  said  that  morning,  giving  the  big  bay  a 
friendly  slap  and  fastening  the  trace  as  she 
stepped  over.  "We'd  better  get  the  hay  under 
cover  before  night." 

There  was  no  sign  of  a  cloud  in  the  bright, 
hot  sky,  but  none  of  the  hired  men  disputed  him. 
William  Ford  was  a  good  farmer,  thrifty  and 
weather-wise.  Every  field  of  his  3OO-acre  farm 
was  well  cared  for,  yielding  richly  every  year; 
his  cattle  were  fat  and  sleek,  his  big  red  barns 
the  best  filled  in  the  neighborhood.  He  was  not 
the  man  to  let  ten  acres  of  good  timothy-and- 


HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

clover  hay  get  caught  in  a  summer  shower  and 
spoil. 

They  put  the  big  hay-rack  on  the  wagon,  threw 
in  the  stone  water  jugs,  filled  with  cool  water 
from  the  well  near  the  kitchen  door,  and  drove 
out  to  the  meadow.  One  imagines  them  work 
ing  there,  lifting  great  forksful  of  the  clover- 
scented  hay,  tossing  them  into  the  rack,  where, 
on  the  rising  mound,  the  youngest  man  was  kept 
busy  shifting  and  settling  them  with  his  fork. 
Grasshoppers  whirred  up  from  the  winrows  of 
the  dried  grass  when  they  were  disturbed,  and 
quails  called  from  the  fence  corners. 

Now  and  then  the  men  stopped  to  wipe  the 
sweat  from  their  foreheads  and  to  take  long  swal 
lows  from  the  water  jugs,  hidden,  for  coolness, 
under  a  mound  of  hay.  Then,  with  a  look  at 
the  sky,  they  took  up  their  forks. 

William  Ford  worked  with  the  others,  doing 
a  good  day's  task  with  the  best  of  them,  and 
proud  of  it.  He  was  the  owner,  and  they  were 
the  hired  men,  but  on  a  Michigan  farm  the  meas 
ure  of  a  man  is  the  part  he  takes  in  man's  work. 
In  the  cities,  where  men  work  against  men,  let 
them  build  up  artificial  distinctions;  on  the  farm 
the  fight  is  against  nature,  and  men  stand  shoul 
der  to  shoulder  in  it.  A  dark  cloud  was  coming 
up  in  the  northwest,  and  every  man's  muscles 
leaped  to  the  need  for  getting  in  the  hay. 

Suddenly  they  heard  a  clang  from  the  great 
bell,  hung  high  on  a  post  in  the  home  dooryard, 


ONE  SUMMER'S  DAY  3 

and  used  only  for  calling  in  the  men  at  dinner 
time  or  for  some  emergency  alarm.  Every  man 
stopped.  It  was  only  10  o'clock.  Then  they  saw 
a  fluttering  apron  at  the  barnyard  gate,  and  Wil 
liam  Ford  dropped  his  fork. 

"I'll  go.  Get  in  the  hay !"  he  called  back,  al 
ready  running  over  the  stubble  in  long  strides. 
The  men  stared  a  minute  longer  and  then  turned 
back  to  work,  a  little  more  slowly  this  time,  with 
the  boss  gone.  A  few  minutes  later  they  stopped 
again  to  watch  him  riding  out  of  the  home  yard 
and  down  the  road,  urging  the  little  gray  mare 
to  a  run. 

"Going  for  Doc  Hall,"  they  surmised.  They 
got  in  a  few  more  loads  of  hay  before  the  rain 
came,  spattering  in  big  drops  on  their  straw  hats 
and  making  a  pleasant  rustling  on  the  thirsty 
meadows.  Then  they  climbed  into  the  half -filled 
rack  and  drove  down  to  the  big  barn. 

They  sat  idly  there  in  the  dimness,  watching 
through  the  wide  doors  the  gray  slant  of  the  rain. 
The  doctor  had  come;  one  of  the  men  unhitched 
his  horse  and  led  it  into  a  stall,  while  another 
pulled  the  light  cart  under  the  shed.  Dinner  time 
came  and  passed.  There  was  no  call  from  the 
house,  and  they  did  not  go  in.  Once  in  a  while 
they  laughed  nervously,  and  remarked  that  it  was 
a  shame  they  did  not  save  the  last  three  loads 
of  hay.  Good  hay,  too,  ran  a  full  four  tons 
to  the  acre. 

About   2   o'clock   in   the   afternoon   the   rain 


4         HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

changed  to  a  light  drizzle  and  the  clouds  broke. 
Later  William  Ford  came  out  of  the  house  and 
crossed  the  soppy  yard.  He  was  grinning  a  little. 
It  was  all  right,  he  said — a  boy. 

I  believe  they  had  up  a  jug  of  sweet  cider  from 
the  cellar  in  honor  of  the  occasion.  I  know  that 
when  they  apologetically  mentioned  the  spoiled 
hay  he  laughed  heartily  and  asked  what  they  sup 
posed  he  cared  about  the  hay. 

"What' re  you  going  to  call  him,  Ford?"  one 
of  the  men  asked  him  as  they  stood  around  the 
cider  jug,  wiping  their  lips  on  the  backs  of  their 
hands. 

"The  wife's  named  him  already — Henry,"  he 
said. 

"Well,  he'll  have  his  share  of  one  of  the  finest 
farms  in  Michigan  one  of  these  days,"  they  said, 
and  while  William  Ford  said  nothing  he  must 
have  looked  over  his  green  rolling  acres  with  a 
pardonable  pride,  reflecting  that  the  new  boy- 
baby  need  never  want  for  anything  in  reason. 

Henry  was  the  second  son  of  William  Ford 
and  Mary  Litogot  Ford,  his  energetic,  whole 
some  Holland  Dutch  wife.  While  he  was  still 
in  pinafores,  tumbling  about  the  house  or  making 
daring  excursions  into  the  barnyard,  the  strong 
hold  of  the  dreadful  turkey  gobbler,  his  sister, 
Margaret,  was  born,  and  Henry  had  barely  been 
promoted  to  real  trousers,  at  the  age  of  four, 
when  another  brother  arrived. 

Four   babies,    to   be   bathed,   clothed,   taught, 


ONE  SUMMER'S  DAY  5 

loved  and  guarded  from  all  the  childish  disasters 
to  be  encountered  about  the  farm,  might  well  be 
thought  enough  to  fill  any  woman's  mind  and 
hands,  but  there  were  a  thousand  additional  tasks 
for  the  mistress  of  that  large  household. 

There  was  milk  to  skim,  butter  and  cheese  to 
make,  poultry  and  garden  to  be  tended,  patch 
work  quilts  to  sew,  and  later  to  fasten  into  the 
quilting  frames  and  stitch  by  hand  in  herring 
bone  or  fan  patterns.  The  hired  hands  must  be 
fed — 'twenty  or  thirty  of  them  in  harvesting 
time;  pickles,  jams,  jellies,  sweet  cider,  vinegar 
must  be  made  and  stored  away  on  the  cellar 
shelves.  When  the  hogs  were  killed  in  the  fall 
there  were  sausages,  head-cheese,  pickled  pigs' 
feet  to  prepare,  hams  and  shoulders  to  be  soaked 
in  brine  and  smoked ;  onions,  peppers,  popcorn  to 
be  braided  in  long  strips  and  hung  in  the  attic; 
while  every  day  bread,  cake  and  pies  must  be 
baked,  and  the  house  kept  in  that  "apple-pie  or 
der"  so  dear  to  the  pride  of  the  Michigan  farm 
ers'  women- folk. 

All  these  tasks  Mary  Ford  did,  or  superin 
tended,  efficiently,  looking  to  the  ways  of  her 
household  with  all  the  care  and  pride  her  hus 
band  had  in  managing  the  farm.  She  found 
time,  too,  to  be  neighborly,  to  visit  her  friends, 
care  for  one  of  them  who  fell  ill,  help  any  one  in 
the  little  community  who  needed  it.  And  always 
she  watched  over  the  health  and  manners  of  the 
children. 


6        HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

In  this  environment  Henry  grew.  He  was  en 
ergetic,  interested  in  everything,  from  the  first. 
His  misadventures  in  conquering  the  turkey  gob 
bler  would  fill  a  chapter.  When  he  was  a  little 
older  one  of  the  hired  men  would  put  him  on  the 
back  of  a  big  farm  horse  and  let  him  ride  around 
the  barnyard,  or  perhaps  he  was  allowed  to  carry 
a  spiced  drink  of  vinegar  and  water  to  the  men 
working  in  the  harvest  field.  He  learned .  every 
corner  of  the  hay-mow,  and  had  a  serious  inter 
view  with  his  father  over  the  matter  of  sliding 
down  the  straw-stacks.  In  the  winters,  wrapped 
in  a  knit  muffler,  with  mittens  of  his  mother's 
making  on  his  hands,  he  played  in  the  snow  or 
spent  whole  afternoons  sliding  on  the  ice  with 
his  brothers. 

Best  of  all  he  liked  the  "shop,"  where  the  black 
smith  work  for  the  farm  was  done  and  the  sharp 
ening  of  tools.  When  the  weather  was  bad  out 
side  his  father  or  one  of  the  men  lighted  the  char 
coal  in  the  forge  and  Henry  might  pull  the  bel 
lows  till  the  fire  glowed  and  the  iron  buried  in  it 
shone  white-hot.  Then  the  sparks  flew  from  the 
anvil  while  the  great  hammer  clanged  on  the 
metal,  shaping  it,  and  Henry  begged  to  be  al 
lowed  to  try  it  himself,  just  once.  In  time  he 
was  given  a  small  hammer  of  his  own. 

So  the  years  passed  until  Henry  was  1 1  years 
old,  and  then  a  momentous  event  occurred — small 
enough  in  itself,  but  to  this  day  one  of  the  keen 
est  memories  of  his  childhood. 


CHAPTER  II 

MENDING  A  WATCH 

THIS  first  memorable  event  of  Henry  Ford's 
childhood  occurred  on  a  Sunday  in  the  spring  of 
his  eleventh  year. 

In  that  well-regulated  household  Sunday,  as  a 
matter  of  course,  was  a  day  of  stiffly  starched, 
dressed-up  propriety  for  the  children,  and  of 
custom-enforced  idleness  for  the  elders.  In  the 
morning  the  fat  driving  horses,  brushed  till 
their  glossy  coats  shone  in  the  sun,  were  hitched 
to  the  two-seated  carriage,  and  the  family  drove 
to  church.  William  and  Mary  Ford  were  Epis 
copalians,  and  Henry  was  reared  in  that  faith, 
although  both  then  and  later  he  showed  little 
enthusiasm  for  church-going. 

Sitting  through  the  long  service  in  the  stuffy 
little  church,  uncomfortably  conscious  of  his  Sun 
day-best  garments,  sternly  forbidden  to  "fidget," 
while  outside  were  all  the  sights  and  sounds  of 
a  country  spring  must  have  seemed  a  wanton 
waste  of  time  to  small  Henry.  To  this  day  he 
has  not  greatly  changed  that  opinion. 

"Religion,  like  everything  else,  is  a  thing  that 
should  be  kept  working,"  he  says.  "I  see  no  use 
in  spending  a  great  deal  of  time  learning  about 

7 


8         HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

heaven  and  hell.  In  my  opinion,  a  man  makes 
his  own  heaven  and  hell  and  carries  it  around 
with  him.  Both  of  them  are  states  of  mind." 

On  this  particular  Sunday  morning  Henry  was 
more  than  usually  rebellious.  It  was  the  first 
week  he  had  been  allowed  to  leave  off  his  shoes 
and  stockings  for  the  summer,  and  Henry  had 
all  a  country  boy's  ardor  for  "going  barefoot.'7 
To  cramp  his  joyously  liberated  toes  again  into 
stuffy,  leather  shoes  seemed  to  him  an  outrage. 
He  resented  his  white  collar,  too,  and  the  im 
maculate  little  suit  his  mother  cautioned  him  to 
keep  clean.  He  was  not  sullen  about  it.  He 
merely  remarked  frankly  that  he  hated  their  old 
Sunday,  anyhow,  and  wished  never  to  see  an 
other. 

Mother  and  father  and  the  four  children  set 
out  for  church  as  usual.  At  the  hitching  posts, 
where  William  Ford  tied  the  horses  before  going 
in  to  the  church,  they  met  their  neighbors,  the 
Bennetts.  Will  Bennett,  a  youngster  about 
Henry's  age,  hailed  him  from  the  other  carriage. 

"Hi,  Hen!  C'm'ere!  I  got  something  you 
ain't  got !" 

Henry  scrambled  out  over  the  wheel  and  hur 
ried  to  see  what  it  might  be.  It  was  a  watch,  a 
real  watch,  as  large  and  shiny  as  his  father's. 
Henry  looked  at  it  with  awed  admiration,  and 
then  with  envy.  It  was  Will's  own  watch;  his 
grandfather  had  given  it  to  him. 

On  a  strict,  cross-your-heart  promise  to  give 


MENDING  A  WATCH  9 

it  back,  Henry  was  allowed  to  take  it  in  his  hands. 
Then  he  cheered  up  somewhat. 

"That  ain't  much!"  he  scornfully  remarked. 
"It  ain't  runnin' !"  At  the  same  moment  a  daz 
zling  idea  occurred  to  him.  He  had  always 
wanted  to  see  the  insides  of  a  watch. 

"I  bet  I  c'n  fix  it  for  you,"  he  declared. 

A  few  minutes  later,  when  Mary  Ford  looked 
for  Henry,  he  was  nowhere  to  be  found.  Will 
was  also  missing.  When,  after  services,  they 
had  not  appeared,  the  parents  became  worried. 
They  searched.  Inquiries  and  explorations  failed 
to  reveal  the  boys. 

They  were  in  the  Bennetts'  farm  "shop,"  busy 
with  the  watch.  Having  no  screw-driver  small 
enough,  Henry  made  one  by  filing  a  shingle  nail. 
Then  he  set  to  work  and  took  out  every  screw 
in  the  mechanism. 

The  works  came  out  of  the  case,  to  the  ac 
companiment  of  an  agonized  protest  from  Will; 
the  cogs  fell  apart,  the  springs  unwound.  Alto 
gether  it  was  a  beautiful  disorder,  enough  to  de 
light  any  small  boy. 

"Now  look  what  you've  went  and  done !"  cried 
Will,  torn  between  natural  emotion  over  the  dis 
aster  to  his  watch  and  admiration  of  Henry's 
daring. 

"Well,  you  SAID  you  was  goin'  ta  put  it  to 
gether,"  he  reminded  that  experimenter  many 
times  in  the  next  few  hours. 

Dinner  time  came,  and  Will,  recalling  the  fried 


io       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

chicken,  dumplings,  puddings,  cakes,  of  the  Sun 
day  dinner,  grew  more  than  restless,  but  Henry- 
held  him  there  by  the  sheer  force  of  his  en 
thusiasm.  The  afternoon  wore  along,  and  he  was 
still  investigating  those  fascinating  gears  and 
springs. 

When  at  last  outraged  parental  authority  de 
scended  upon  the  boys,  Henry's  Sunday  clothes 
were  a  wreck,  his  hands  and  face  were  grimy,  but 
he  had  correctly  replaced  most  of  the  screws,  and 
he  passionately  declared  that  if  they  would  only 
leave  him  alone  he  would  have  the  watch  run 
ning  in  no  time. 

Family  discipline  was  strict  in  those  days.  Un 
doubtedly  Henry  was  punished,  but  he  does  not 
recall  that  now.  What  he  does  remember  vividly 
is  the  passion  for  investigating  clocks  and  watches 
that  followed.  In  a  few  months  he  had  taken 
apart  and  put  together  every  timepiece  on  the 
place,  excepting  only  his  father's  watch. 

"Every  clock  in  the  house  shuddered  when  it 
saw  me  coming/'  he  says.  But  the  knowledge  he 
acquired  was  more  than  useful  to  him  later, 
when  at  sixteen  he  faced  the  problem  of  making 
his  own  living  in  Detroit. 

In  those  days  farm  life  had  no  great  appeal 
for  him.  There  were  plenty  of  chores  to  be  done 
by  an  active  boy  of  12  on  that  farm,  where  every 
bit  of  energy  was  put  to  some  useful  purpose.  He 
drove  up  the  cows  at  night,  kept  the  kitchen 
wood-box  filled,  helped  to  hitch  and  unhitch  the 


MENDING  A  WATCH  n 

horses,  learned  to  milk  and  chop  kindling.  He 
recalls  that  his  principal  objection  to  such  work 
was  that  it  was  always  interrupting  some  inter 
esting  occupation  he  had  discovered  for  himself 
in  the  shop.  He  liked  to  handle  tools,  to  make 
something.  The  chores  were  an  endless  repeti 
tion  of  the  same  task,  with  no  concrete  object 
created. 

In  the  winter  he  went  to  the  district  school, 
walking  two  miles  and  back  every  day  through 
the  snow,  and  enjoying  it.  He  did  not  care  for 
school  especially,  although  he  got  fair  marks  in 
his  studies,  and  was  given  to  helping  other  boys 
"get  their  problems."  Arithmetic  was  easy  for 
him.  His  mind  was  already  developing  its  me 
chanical  trend. 

"I  always  stood  well  with  the  teacher,"  he  says 
with  a  twinkle.  "I  found  things  ran  more 
smoothly  that  way/'  He  was  not  the  boy  to 
create  unnecessary  friction  in  his  human  relations, 
finding  it  as  wasteful  of  energy  there  as  it  would 
have  been  in  any  of  the  mechanical  contrivances 
he  made.  He  "got  along  pretty  well"  with  every 
one,  until  the  time  came  to  fight,  and  then  he 
fought,  hard  and  quick. 

Under  his  leadership,  for  he  was  popular  with 
the  other  boys,  the  Greenfield  school  saw  strange 
things  done.  Henry  liked  to  play  as  well  as  any 
boy,  but  somehow  in  his  thrifty  ancestry  there 
had  been  developed  a  strong  desire  to  have  some 
thing  to  show  for  time  spent.  Swimming,  skat- 


12       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

ing1  and  the  like  were  all  very  well  until  he  had 
thoroughly  learned  them,  but  why  keep  on  after 
that  ?  Henry  wanted  to  do  something  else  then. 
And  as  for  spending  a  whole  afternoon  batting 
a  ball  around,  that  seemed  to  him  a  foolish  occu 
pation. 

Accordingly,  he  constructed  a  working  forge 
in  the  schoolyard,  and  he  and  his  crowd  spent 
every  recess  and  noon  during  one  autumn  work 
ing  at  it.  There,  with  the  aid  of  a  blow-pipe, 
they  melted  every  bottle  arid  bit  of  broken  glass 
they  could  find  and  recast  them  into  strange 
shapes.  It  was  Henry,  too,  who  devised  the  plan 
of  damming  the  creek  that  ran  near  the  school- 
house,  and  by  organizing  the  other  boys  into  reg 
ular  gangs,  with  a  subforeman  for  each,  accom 
plished  the  task  so  thoroughly  and  quickly  that 
he  had  flooded  two  acres  of  potatoes  before  an 
outraged  farmer  knew  what  was  happening. 

But  these  occupations,  absorbing  enough  for 
the  time  being,  did  not  fill  his  imagination. 
Henry  already  dreamed  of  bigger  things.  He 
meant,  some  day,  to  be  a  locomotive  engineer. 
When  he  saw  the  big,  black  engines  roaring 
across  the  Michigan  farm  lands,  under  their 
plumes  of  smoke,  and  when  he  caught  a  glimpse 
of  the  sooty  man  in  overalls  at  the  throttle,  he 
felt  an  ambitious  longing.  Some  day ! 

It  was  on  the  whole  a  busy,  happy  childhood, 
spent  for  the  most  part  out  of  doors.  Henry 
grew  freckled,  sunburned  the  skin  from  his  nose 


MENDING  A  WATCH  13 

and  neck  in  the  swimming  pool,  scratched  his 
bare  legs  on  blackberry  briars.  He  learned  how 
to  drive  horses,  how  to  handle  a  hay  fork  or  a 
hoe,  how  to  sharpen  and  repair  the  farm  tools. 
The  "shop"  was  the  most  interesting  part  of  the 
farm  to  him ;  it  was  there  he  invented  and  manu 
factured  a  device  for  opening  and  closing  the 
farm  gates  without  getting  down  from  the  wagon. 
Then,  when  he  was  14,  an  event  occurred 
which  undoubtedly  changed  the  course  of  his  life. 
Mary  Ford  died. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    FIRST    JOB 

WHEN  Mary  Ford  died  the  heart  of  the  home 
went  with  her.  "The  house  was  like  a  watch 
without  a  mainspring,"  her  son  says.  William 
Ford  did  his  best,  but  it  must  have  been  a  pa 
thetic  attempt,  that  effort  of  the  big,  hardworking 
farmer  to  take  a  mother's  place  to  the  four  chil 
dren. 

For  a  time  a  married  aunt  came  in  and  man 
aged  the  household,  but  she  was  needed  in  her 
own  home  and  soon  went  back  to  it.  Then  Mar 
garet,  Henry's  youngest  sister,  took  charge,  and 
tried  to  keep  the  house  in  order  and  superintend 
the  work  of  "hired  girls"  older  than  herself.  She 
was  "capable" — that  good  New  England  word  so 
much  more  expressive  than  "efficient" — -but  no 
one  could  take  Mary  Ford's  place  in  that  home. 

There  was  now  nothing  to  hold  Henry  on  the 
farm.  He  had  learned  how  to  do  the  farm  work, 
and  the  little  attraction  it  had  had  for  him  was 
gone;  thereafter  every  task  was  merely  a  repeti 
tion.  His  father  did  not  need  his  help;  there 
were  always  the  hired  men.  I  suppose  any  need 
William  Ford  may  have  felt  for  the  companion 
ship  of  his  second  son  was  unexpressed.  In  mat- 

14 


THE  FIRST  JOB  15 

ters  of  emotion  the  family  is  not  demonstrative. 

The  boy  had  exhausted  the  possibilities  of  the 
farm  shop.  His  last  work  in  it  was  the  building 
of  a  small  steam-engine.  For  this,  helped  partly 
by  pictures,  partly  by  his  boyish  ingenuity,  he 
made  his  own  patterns,  his  own  castings,  did  his 
own  machine  work. 

His  material  was  bits  of  old  iron,  pieces  of 
wagon  tires,  stray  teeth  from  harrows — anything 
and  everything  from  the  scrap  pile  in  the  shop 
which  he  could  utilize  in  any  imaginable  way. 
When  the  engine  was  finished  Henry  mounted 
it  on  an  improvised  chassis  which  he  had  cut 
down  from  an  old  farm  wagon,  attached  it  by  a 
direct  drive  to  a  wheel  on  one  side,  something  like 
a  locomotive  connecting-rod,  and  capped  the 
whole  with  a  whistle  which  could  be  heard  for 
miles. 

When  he  had  completed  the  job  he  looked  at 
the  result  with  some  natural  pride.  Sitting  at 
the  throttle,  tooting  the  ear-splitting  whistle,  he 
charged  up  and  down  the  meadow  lot  at  nearly 
ten  miles  an  hour,  frightening  every  cow  on  the 
place.  But  after  all  his  work,  for  some  reason 
the  engine  did  not  please  him  long.  Possibly  the 
lack  of  enthusiasm  with  which  it  was  received 
disappointed  him. 

In  the  technical  journals  which  he  read  eagerly 
during  his  sixteenth  winter,  he  learned  about  the 
big  iron  works  of  Detroit,  saw  pictures  of  ma 
chines  he  longed  to  handle. 


16       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Early  the  next  spring,  when  the  snow  had 
melted,  and  every  breeze  that  blew  across  the 
fields  was  an  invitation  to  begin  something  new, 
Henry  started  to  school  as  usual  one  morning, 
and  did  not  return. 

Detroit  is  only  a  few  miles  from  Greenfield. 
Henry  made  the  journey  on  the  train  that  morn 
ing,  and  while  his  family  supposed  him  at  school 
and  the  teacher  was  marking  a  matter-of-fact 
"absent"  after  his  name,  he  had  already  set  about 
his  independent  career. 

He  had  made  several  trips  to  Detroit  in  the 
past,  but  this  time  the  city  looked  very  different 
to  him.  It  had  worn  a  holiday  appearance  be 
fore,  but  now  it  seemed  stern  and  busy — a  little 
too  busy,  perhaps,  to  waste  much  attention  on  a 
country  boy  of  sixteen  looking  for  a  job. 

Nevertheless,  he  whistled  cheerfully  enough  to 
himself,  and  started  briskly  through  the  crowds. 
He  knew  what  he  wanted,  and  he  was  going 
straight  for  it. 

"I  always  knew  I  would  get  what  I  went 
after,"  he  says.  "I  don't  recall  having  any  very 
great  doubts  or  fears." 

At  that  time  the  shop  of  James  Flower  and 
Company,  manufacturers  of  steam  engines  and 
steam  engine  appliances,  was  one  of  Detroit's 
largest  factories.  Over  one  hundred  men  were 
employed  there,  and  their  output  was  one  to  be 
pointed  to  with  pride  by  boastful  citizens. 

Henry  Ford's  nerves,  healthy  and  steady  as 


THE  FIRST  JOB  17 

they  were,  tingled  with  excitement  when  he  en 
tered  the  place.  He  had  read  of  it,  and  had  even 
seen  a  picture  of  it,  but  now  he  beheld  for  him 
self  its  size  and  the  great  number  of  machines 
and  men.  This  was  something  big,  he  said  to 
himself. 

After  a  moment  he  asked  a  man  working  near 
where  he  could  find  the  foreman. 

"Over  there — the  big  fellow  in  the  red  shirt," 
the  man  replied.  Henry  hurried  over  and  asked 
for  a  job. 

The  foreman  looked  at  him  and  saw  a  slight, 
wiry  country  boy  who  wanted  work.  There  was 
nothing  remarkable  about  him,  one  supposes. 
The  foreman  did  not  perceive  immediately,  after 
one  look  into  his  steady  eye,  that  this  was  no 
ordinary  lad,  as  foremen  so  frequently  do  in  fic 
tion.  Instead,  he  looked  Henry  over,  asked  him 
a  question  or  two,  remembered  that  a  big  order 
had  just  corne  in  and  he  was  short  of  hands. 

"Well,  come  to  work  to-morrow.  I'll  see  what 
you  can  do,"  he  said.  "Pay  you  two  and  a  half 
a  week." 

"All  right,  sir,"  Henry  responded  promptly, 
but  the  foreman  had  already  turned  his  back  and 
forgotten  him.  Henry,  almost  doubtful  of  his 
good  fortune,  hurried  away  before  the  foreman 
should  change  his  mind. 

Outside  in  the  sunshine  he  pushed  his  cap  on 
the  back  of  his  head,  thrust  his  hands  deep  into  his 
pockets,  jingling  the  silver  in  one  of  them,  and 


i8       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

walked  down  the  street,  whistling.  The  world 
looked  like  a  good  place  to  him.  No  more  farm 
ing  for  Henry  Ford.  He  was  a  machinist  now, 
with  a  job  in  the  James  Flower  shops. 

Before  him  there  unrolled  a  bright  future.  He 
was  ambitious;  he  did  not  intend  always  to  re 
main  a  mechanic.  One  day  when  he  had  learned 
all  there  was  to  know  about  the  making  of  steam 
engines,  he  intended  to  drive  one  himself.  He 
would  be  a  locomotive  engineer,  nothing  less. 

Meantime  there  were  practical  questions  of 
food  and  shelter  to  consider  immediately  and  he 
was  not  the  boy  to  waste  time  in  speculations  for 
the  future  when  there  was  anything  to  be  done. 
He  counted  his  money.  Almost  four  dollars,  and 
a  prospect  of  two  and  a  half  every  week.  Then 
he  set  out  to  find  a  boarding  house. 

Two  dollars  and  a  half  a  week,  not  a  large 
living  income,  even  in  1878.  Henry  walked  a 
long  time  looking  for  a  landlady  who  would  con 
sent  to  board  a  healthy  sixteen-year-old  mechanic 
for  that  sum.  It  was  late  that  afternoon  before 
he  found  one  who,  after  some  hesitation,  agreed 
to  do  it.  Then  he  looked  at  the  small,  dirty  room 
she  showed  him,  at  her  untidy,  slatternly  person, 
and  decided  that  he  would  not  live  there.  He 
came  out  into  the  street  again. 

Henry  was  facing  the  big  problem.  How  was 
he  to  live  on  an  income  too  small?  Apparently 
his  mind  went,  with  the  precision  of  a  machine, 
directly  to  the  answer. 


THE  FIRST  JOB  19 

"When  your  reasonable  expenses  exceed  your 
income,  increase  your  income/'  Simple.  He 
knew  that  after  he  had  finished  his  day's  work 
at  the  shops  there  would  be  a  margin  of  several 
hours  a  day  left  to  him.  He  would  have  to  turn 
them  into  money.  That  was  all. 

He  returned  to  a  clean  boarding  house  he  had 
visited  earlier  in  the  day,  paid  three  dollars  and 
a  half  in  advance  for  one  week's  board,  and  ate 
a  hearty  supper.  Then  he  went  to  bed. 


CHAPTER  IV 

AN  EXACTING  ROUTINE 

MEANTIME  back  in  Greenfield  there  was  a 
flurry  of  excitement  and  not  a  little  worry. 
Henry  did  not  return  from  school  in  time  to  help 
with  the  chores.  When  supper  time  came  and 
went  without  his  appearing  Margaret  was  sure 
some  terrible  accident  had  occurred. 

A  hired  man  was  sent  to  make  inquiries.  He 
returned  with  the  news  that  Henry  had  not  been 
in  school.  Then  William  Ford  himself  hitched 
up  and  drove  about  the  neighborhood  looking  for 
the  boy.  With  characteristic  reserve  and  inde 
pendence  Henry  had  taken  no  one  into  his  confi 
dence,  but  late  that  night  his  father  returned 
with  information  that  he  had  been  seen  taking  the 
train  for  Detroit. 

William  Ford  knew  his  son.  When  he  found 
that  Henry  had  left  of  his  own, accord  he  told 
Margaret  dryly  that  the  boy  could  take  care  of 
himself  and  there  was  nothing  to  worry  about. 
However,  after  two  days  had  gone  by  without 
any  word  from  Henry  his  father  went  up  to  De 
troit  to  look  for  him. 

Those  two  days  had  been  full  of  interest  for 
20 


AN  EXACTING  ROUTINE  21 

Henry.  He  found  that  his  hours  in  the  machine 
shop  were  from  seven  in  the  morning  to  six  at 
night,  with  no  idle  moments  in  any  of  them.  He 
helped  at  the  forges,  made  castings,  assembled 
parts.  He  was  happy.  There  were  no  chores  or 
school  to  interrupt  his  absorption  in  machinery. 
Every  hour  he  learned  something  new  about 
steam  engines.  When  the  closing  whistle  blew 
and  the  men  dropped  their  tools  he  was  sorry  to 
quit. 

Still,  there  was  that  extra  dollar  a  week  to  be 
made  somehow.  As  soon  as  he  had  finished  sup 
per  the  first  night  he  hurried  out  to  look  for  an 
evening  job.  It  never  occurred  to  him  to  work 
at  anything  other  than  machinery.  He  was  a 
machine  "fan,"  just  as  some  boys  are  baseball 
fans;  he  liked  mechanical  problems.  A  batting 
average  never  interested  him,  but  "making  things 
go" — there  was  real  fun  in  that. 

Machine  shops  were  not  open  at  night,  but 
he  recalled  his  experiments  with  the  luckless  fam 
ily  clock.  He  hunted  up  a  jeweler  and  asked  him 
for  night  work.  Then  he  hunted  up  another,  and 
another.  None  of  them  needed  an  assistant. 
When  the  jewelers'  shops  closed  that  night  he 
went  back  to  his  boarding-house. 

He  spent  another  day  at  work  in  the  James 
Flower  shops.  He  spent*  -another  night  looking 
for  work  with  a  jeweler.  The  third  day,  late 
in  the  afternoon,  his  father  found  him.  Know 
ing  Henry's  interests,  William  Ford  had  begun 


22       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

his  search  by  inquiring  for  the  boy  in  Detroit's 
machine  shops. 

He  spoke  to  the  foreman  and  took  Henry  out 
side.  There  was  an  argument.  William  Ford, 
backed  by  the  force  of  parental  authority,  de 
clared  sternly  that  the  place  for  Henry  was  in 
school.  Henry,  with  two  days'  experience  in  a 
real  iron  works,  hotly  declared  that  he'd  never 
go  back  to  school,  not  if  he  was  licked  for  it. 

"What's  the  good  of  the  old  school,  anyhow? 
I  want  to  learn  to  make  steam  engines,"  he  said. 
In  the  end  William  Ford  saw  the  futility  of  ar 
gument.  He  must  have  been  an  unusually  rea 
sonable  father,  for  the  time  and  place.  It  would 
have  been  a  simple  matter  to  lead  Henry  home 
by  the  ear  and  keep  him  there  until  he  ran  away 
again,  and  in  1878  most  Michigan  fathers  in  his 
situation  would  have  done  it. 

"Well,  you  know  where  your  home  is  any  time 
you  want  to  come  back  to  it,"  he  said  finally,  and 
went  back  to  the  farm. 

Henry  was  now  definitely  on  his  own  re 
sources.  With  urgent  need  for  that  extra  dollar 
a  week  weighing  more  heavily  on  his  mind  every 
day,  he  spent  his  evenings  searching  for  night 
work.  Before  the  time  arrived  to  pay  his  second 
week's  board  he  had  found  a  jeweler  who  was 
willing  to  pay  him  two  dollars  a  week  for  four 
hours'  work  every  night. 

The  arrangement  left  Henry  with  a  dollar  a 


AN  EXACTING  ROUTINE  23 

week  for  spending  money.  This  was  embar 
rassing  riches. 

"I  never  did  figure  out  how  to  spend  the  whole 
of  that  dollar,"  he  says.  "I  really  had  no  use 
for  it.  My  board  and  lodging  were  paid  and  the 
clothes  I  had  were  good  enough  for  the  shop.  I 
never  have  known  what  to  do  with  money  after 
my  expenses  were  paid — can't  squander  it  on 
myself  without  hurting  myself,  and  nobody  wants 
to  do  that.  Money  is  the  most  useless  thing  in 
the  world,  anyhow." 

His  life  now  settled  into  a  routine  eminently 
satisfactory  to  him — a  routine  that  lasted  for 
nine  months.  From  seven  in  the  morning  to  six 
at  night  in  the  machine  shop,  from  seven  to 
eleven  in  the  evening  at  work  with  a  microscope, 
repairing  and  assembling  watches,  then  home  to 
bed  for  a  good  six  hours'  sleep,  and  back  to  work 
again. 

Day  followed  day,  exactly  alike,  except  that 
every  one  of  them  taught  him  something  about 
machines — either  steam  engines  or  watches.  He 
went  to  bed,  rose,  ate,  worked  on  a  regular  sched 
ule,  following  the  same  route — the  shortest  one — 
from  the  boarding-house  to  the  shops,  to  the  jew 
eler's,  back  to  the  boarding-house  again. 

Before  long  he  found  that  he  could  spend  a 
part  of  his  dollar  profitably  in  buying  technical 
journals — French,  English,  German  magazines 
dealing  with  mechanics.  He  read  these  in  his 
room  after  returning  from  the  jeweler's. 


24       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Few  boys  of  sixteen  could  endure  a  routine 
so  exacting  in  its  demands  on  strength  and  en 
durance  without  destroying  their  health,  but 
Henry  Ford  had  the  one  trait  common  to  all  men 
of  achievement — an  apparently  inexhaustible  en 
ergy.  His  active,  out-of-door  boyhood  had  stored 
up  physical  reserves  of  it;  his  one  direct  interest 
gave  him  his  mental  supply.  He  wanted  to  learn 
about  machines ;  that  was  all  he  wanted.  He  was 
never  distracted  by  other  impulses  or  tastes. 

"Recreation?  No,  I  had  no  recreation;  I 
didn't  want  it,"  he  says.  "What's  the  value  of 
recreation,  anyhow?  It's  just  waste  time.  I  got 
my  fun  out  of  my  work." 

He  was  obsessed  by  his  one  idea. 

In  a  few  months  he  had  mastered  all  the  in 
tricate  details  of  building  steam  engines.  The 
mammoth  shop  of  James  Flower  &  Co.,  with  its 
great  force  of  a  hundred  mechanics,  became  fa 
miliar  to  him;  it  shrank  from  the  huge  propor 
tions  it  had  at  first  assumed  in  his  eyes.  He  be 
gan  to  see  imperfections  in  its  system  and  to  be 
annoyed  by  them. 

"See  here,"  he  said  one  day  to  the  man  who 
worked  beside  him.  "Nothing's  ever  made  twice 
alike  in  this  place.  We  waste  a  lot  of  time  and 
material  assembling  these  engines.  That  piston 
rod'll  have  to  be  made  over ;  it  won't  fit  the  cylin 
der." 

"Oh,  well,  I  guess  we  do  the  best  we  can,"  the 
other  man  said.  "It  won't  take  long  to  fit  it." 


AN  EXACTING  ROUTINE  25 

It  was  the  happy-go-lucky  method  of  factories  in 
the  seventies. 

Men  were  shifted  from  job  to  job  to  suit  the 
whim  of  the  foreman  or  the  exigencies  of  a  rush 
order.  Parts  were  cast,  recast,  filed  down  to  fit 
other  parts.  Scrap  iron  accumulated  in  the  cor 
ners  of  the  shop.  A  piece  of  work  was  aban 
doned  half  finished  in  order  to  make  up  time  on 
another  order,  delayed  by  some  accident.  By 
to-day's  standards  it  was  a  veritable  helter-skel 
ter,  from  which  the  finished  machines  somehow 
emerged,  at  a  fearful  cost  in  wasted  time  and 
labor. 

When  Henry  was  switched  from  one  piece  of 
work  to  another,  taken  from  his  job  to  help  some 
other  workman,  or  sent  to  get  a  needed  tool  that 
was  missing,  he  knew  that  his  time  was  being 
wasted.  His  thrifty  instincts  resented  it.  With 
his  mind  full  of  pictures  of  smoothly  running, 
exactly  adjusted  machines,  he  knew  there  was 
something  wrong  with  the  way  the  iron-works 
was  managed. 

He  was  growing  dissatisfied  with  his  job. 


CHAPTER  V 

GETTING  THE  MACHINE  IDEA 

WHEN  Henry  had  been  with  the  James  Flower 
Company  nine  months  his  wages  were  increased. 
He  received  three  dollars  a  week. 

He  was  not  greatly  impressed.  He  had  not 
been  working  for  the  money;  he  wanted  to  learn 
more  about  machines.  As  far  as  he  was  con 
cerned,  the  advantages  of  the  iron- works  were 
nearly  exhausted.  He  had  had  in  turn  nearly 
every  job  in  the  place,  which  had  been  a  good 
education  for  him,  but  the  methods  which  had 
allowed  it  annoyed  him  more  every  day.  He  be 
gan  to  think  the  foreman  rather  a  stupid  fellow, 
with  slipshod,  inefficient  ideas. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  shop  was  a  very  good 
one  for  those  days.  It  turned  out  good  machines, 
and  did  it  with  no  more  waste  than  was  cus 
tomary.  Efficiency  experts,  waste-motion  experi 
ments,  mass  production — in  a  word,  the  machine 
idea  applied  to  human  beings  was  unheard  of 
then. 

Henry  knew  there  was  something  wrong.  He 
did  not  like  to  work  there  any  longer.  Two 
weeks  after  the  additional  fifty  cents  had  been 
added  to  his  pay  envelope  he  left  the  James 

26 


GETTING  THE  MACHINE  IDEA     27 

Flower  Company.  He  had  got  a  job  with  the 
Drydock  Engine  works,  manufacturers  of  ma 
rine  machinery.  His  pay  was  two  dollars  and  a 
half  a  week. 

To  the  few  men  who  knew  him  he  probably 
seemed  a  discontented  boy  who  did  not  know 
when  he  was  well  off.  If  any  of  them  took  the 
trouble  to  advise  him,  they  probably  said  he 
would  do  better  to  stay  with  a  good  thing  while 
he  had  it  than  to  change  around  aimlessly. 

He  was  far  from  being  a  boy  who  needed  that 
advice.  Without  knowing  it,  he  had  found  the 
one  thing  he  was  to  follow  all  his  life — not  ma 
chines  merely,  but  the  machine  idea.  He  went 
to  work  for  the  drydock  company  because  he 
liked  its  organization. 

By  this  time  he  was  a  little  more  than  17  years 
old ;  an  active,  wiry  young  man,  his  muscles  hard 
and  his  hands  calloused  from  work.  After  nearly 
a  year  of  complete  absorption  in  mechanical  prob 
lems,  his  natural  liking  for  human  companion 
ship  began  to  assert  itself.  At  the  drydock  works 
he  found  a  group  of  young  men  like  himself, 
hard-working,  fun-loving  young  mechanics.  In 
a  few  weeks  he  was  popular  with  them. 

They  were  a  clean,  energetic  lot,  clear-think 
ing  and  ambitious,  as  most  mechanics  are.  After 
the  day's  work  was  finished  they  rushed  through 
the  wide  doors  into  the  street,  with  a  whoop  of 
delight  in  the  outdoor  air,  jostling  each  other, 
playing  practical  jokes,  enjoying  a  little  rough 


28       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

horseplay  among  themselves.  In  the  evenings 
they  wandered  about  the  streets  in  couples,  arms 
carelessly  thrown  over  each  other's  shoulders, 
commenting  on  things  they  saw.  They  learned 
every  inch  of  the  water  front;  tried  each  other 
out  in  wrestling  and  boxing. 

Eager  young  fellows,  grasping  at  life  with 
both  hands,  wanting  all  of  it,  and  wanting  it 
right  then — naturally  enough  they  smoked, 
drank,  experimented  with  love-making,  turned 
night  into  day  in  a  joyous  carouse  now  and  then. 
But  before  long  Henry  Ford  was  a  leader  among 
them,  as  he  had  been  among  the  boys  in  the 
Greenfield  school,  and  again  he  diverted  the  en 
ergy  of  his  followers  into  his  own  channels. 

Pursuits  that  had  interested  them  seemed  to 
him  a  waste  of  time  and  strength.  He  did  not 
smoke — his  tentative  attempt  with  hay-cigarettes 
in  his  boyhood  had  discouraged  that  perma 
nently — he  did  not  drink,  and  girls  seemed  to 
him  unutterably  stupid. 

"I  have  never  tasted  liquor  in  my  life,"  he 
says.  "I'd  as  soon  think  of  taking  any  other 
poison." 

Undoubtedly  his  opinion  is  right,  but  one  is  in 
clined  to  doubt  the  accuracy  of  his  memory.  In 
those  early  days  in  Detroit  he  must  have  experi 
mented  at  least  once  with  the  effects  of  liquor 
on  the  human  system ;  probably  once  would  have 
been  sufficient.  Besides,  about  that  time  he  de 
veloped  an  interest  so  strong  that  it  not  only  ab~ 


GETTING  THE  MACHINE  IDEA     29 

sorbed  his  own  attention,  but  carried  that  of  his 
friends  along  with  it. 

He  bought  a  watch.  It  had  taken  him  only  a 
few  months  to  master  his  task  in  the  drydock 
works  so  thoroughly  that  his  wages  were  raised. 
Later  they  were  raised  again.  Then  he  was  get 
ting  five  dollars  a  week,  more  than  enough  to 
pay  his  expenses,  without  night  work.  He  left 
the  jeweler's  shop,  but  he  brought  with  him  a 
watch,  the  first  he  had  ever  owned. 

Immediately  he  took  it  to  pieces.  When  its 
scattered  parts  lay  on  a  table  before  him  he 
looked  at  them  and  marveled.  He  had  paid  three 
dollars  for  the  watch,  and  he  could  not  figure 
out  any  reason  why  it  should  have  cost  so  much. 

"It  ran,"  he  says.  "It  had  some  kind  of  a 
dark  composition  case,  and  it  weighed  a  good 
deal,  and  it  went  along  all  right — never  lost  or 
gained  more  than  a  certain  amount  in  any  given 
day. 

"But  there  wasn't  anything  about  that  watch 
that  should  have  cost  three  dollars.  Nothing  but 
a  lot  of  plain  parts,  made  out  of  cheap  metal. 
I  could  have  made  one  like  it  for  one  dollar,  or 
even  less.  But  it  cost  me  three.  The  only  way 
I  could  figure  it  out  was  that  there  was  a  lot  of 
waste  somewhere." 

Then  he  remembered  the  methods  of  produc 
tion  at  the  James  Flower  Company.  He  reasoned 
that  probably  that  watch  factory  had  turned  out 
only  a  few  hundred  of  that  design,  and  then  tried 


30       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

something  else — alarm  clocks,  perhaps.  The 
parts  had  been  made  by  the  dozen,  some  of  them 
had  probably  been  filed  down  by  hand,  to  make 
them  fit. 

Then  he  got  the  great  idea.  A  factory — a  gi 
gantic  factory,  running  with  the  precision  of  a 
machine,  turning  out  watches  by  the  thousands 
and  tens  of  thousands — watches  all  exactly  alike, 
every  part  cut  by  an  exact  die. 

He  talked  it  over  with  the  boys  at  the  drydock 
works.  He  was  enthusiastic.  He  showed  them 
that  a  watch  could  be  made  for  less  than  half 
a  dollar  by  his  plan.  He  juggled  figures  of  thou 
sands  of  dollars  as  though  they  were  pennies. 
The  size  of  the  sums  did  not  stagger  him,  be 
cause  money  was  never  concrete  to  him — it  was 
merely  rows  of  figures — but  to  the  young  fel 
lows  who  listened  his  talk  was  dazzling. 

They  joined  enthusiastically  in  the  scheme. 
Then  their  evenings  became  merely  so  much  time 
to  spend  up  in  Ford's  room,  figuring  estimates 
and  discussing  plans. 

The  watch  could  be  made  for  thirty-seven 
cents,  provided  machinery  turned  it  out  by  tens 
of  thousands.  Henry  Ford  visualized  the  fac 
tory — a  factory  devoted  to  one  thing,  the  making 
of  ONE  watch — specialized,  concentrated,  with  no 
waste  energy.  Those  eager  young  men  planned 
the  whole  thing  from  furnaces  to  assembling 
rooms. 

They  figured  the  cost  of  material  by  the  hun- 


GETTING  THE  MACHINE  IDEA     31 

dred  tons,  estimated  the  exact  proportions  each 
metal  required ;  they  planned  an  output  of  2,000 
watches  daily  as  the  point  at  which  cost  of  pro 
duction  would  be  cheapest.  They  would  sell  the 
watch  for  fifty  cents,  and  guarantee  it  for  one 
year.  Two  thousand  watches  at  a  profit  of  thir 
teen  cents  each — $260  daily  profit!  They  were 
dazzled. 

"We  needn't  stop  there — we  can  increase  that 
output  when  we  get  started,"  Henry  Ford  de 
clared.  "Organization  will  do  it.  Lack  of  or 
ganization  keeps  prices  up,  for  its  cost  must  be 
charged  in  on  the  selling  price;  and  high  prices 
keep  sales  down.  We  will  work  it  the  other 
way;  low  prices,  increased  sales,  increased  out 
put,  lower  prices.  It  works  in  a  circle.  Listen  to 

this "  He  held  them,  listening,  while  he 

talked  and  figured,  eliminating  waste  here  and 
cutting  expenses  there,  until  the  landlady  came 
up  and  knocked  at  the  door,  asking  if  they  meant 
to  stay  up  all  night. 

It  took  time  to  get  his  ideas  translated  into 
concrete,  exact  figures.  He  worked  over  them 
for  nearly  a  year,  holding  the  enthusiasm  of  his 
friends  at  fever  heat  all  that  time.  Finally  he 
made  drawings  fdr  the  machines  he  planned  and 
cut  dies  for  making  the  different  parts  of  the 
watch. 

His  plan  was  complete — a  gigantic  machine, 
taking  in  bars  of  steel  at  one  end,  and  turning 
out  completed  watches  at  the  other — hundreds  of 


32       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

thousands  of  cheap  watches,  all  alike — the  Ford 
watch ! 

"I  tell  you  there's  a  fortune  in  it — a  fortune !" 
the  young  fellows  in  the  scheme  exclaimed  to 
each  other. 

"All  we  need  now  is  the  capital,"  Ford  de 
cided  at  last. 

He  was  turning  his  mind  to  the  problem  of 
getting  it,  when  he  received  a  letter  from  his 
sister  Margaret.  His  father  had  been  injured 
in  an  accident ;  his  older  brother  was  ill.  Couldn't 
he  come  home  for  a  while  ?  They  needed  him. 


CHAPTER  VI 

BACK  TO  THE  FARM  • 

THE  letter  from  home  must  have  come  like  a 
dash  of  cold  wather  on  Henry's  enthusiastic 
plans.  He  had  been  thinking  in  the  future,  plan 
ning,  rearranging,  adjusting  the  years  just  ahead. 
It  has  always  been  his  instinct  to  do  just  that. 

"You  can't  run  anything  on  precedents  if  you 
want  to  make  a  success,"  he  says  to-day.  "We 
should  be  guiding  our  future  by  the  present,  in 
stead  of  being  guided  in  the  present  by  the  past." 

Suddenly  the  past  had  come  into  his  calcula 
tions.  Henry  spent  a  dark  day  or  two  over  that 
letter — the  universal  struggle  between  the  claims 
of  the  older  generation  and  the  desires  of  the 
younger  one. 

There  was  never  any  real  question  as  to  the 
outcome.  The  machine-idea  has  been  the  con 
trolling  factor  in  his  life,  but  it  has  never  been 
stronger  than  his  human  sympathies.  It  is  in 
adjusting  them  to  each  other,  in  making  human 
sympathies  a  working  business  policy,  that  he  has 
made  his  real  success. 

Of  course  at  that  time  he  did  not  see  such  a 
possibility.  It  was  a  clear-cut  struggle  between 
two  opposing  forces;  on  one  side  the  splendid 

33 


34       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

future  just  ahead,  on  the  other  his  father's  need 
of  him.  He  went  home. 

He  intended  at  the  time  to  stay  only  until  his 
father  was  well  again — perhaps  for  a  month  or 
so,  surely  not  longer  than  one  summer.  The 
plans  for  the  watch  factory  were  not  abandoned, 
they  were  only  laid  aside  temporarily.  It  would 
be  possible  to  run  up  to  Detroit  for  a  day  or  two 
now  and  then,  and  keep  on  working  on  plans  for 
getting  together  the  necessary  capital. 

But  no  business  on  earth  is  harder  to  leave 
than  the  business  of  running  a  farm.  When 
Henry  reached  home  he  found  a  dozen  fields 
needing  immediate  action.  The  corn  had  been 
neglected,  already  weeds  were  springing  up  be 
tween  the  rows ;  in  the  house  his  father  was  fret 
ting  because  the  hired  hands  were  not  feeding 
the  cows  properly,  and  they  were  giving  less  milk. 
The  clover  was  going  to  seed,  while  the  hogs 
looked  hungrily  at  it  through  the  fence  because 
there  was  no  one  to  see  that  their  noses  were 
ringed  and  the  gates  opened.  Some  of  the  plows 
and  harrows  had  been  left  in  the  fields,  where 
they  were  rusting  in  the  summer  sun  and  rain. 

There  was  plenty  of  work  for  Henry.  At  first 
from  day  to  day,  then  from  week  to  week,  he 
put  off  the  trip  to  Detroit.  He  worked  in  the 
fields  with  the  men,  plowing,  planting,  harvest 
ing,  setting  the  pace  for  the  others  to  follow, 
as  an  owner  must  do  on  a  farm.  He  was  learn 
ing,  so  thoroughly  that  he  never  forgot  it,  the  art 


BACK  TO  THE  FARM  35 

of  managing  men  without  losing  the  democratic 
feeling  of  being  one  of  them. 

In  the  mornings  he  was  up  before  daylight,  and 
out  to  the  barn-yard.  He  fed  the  horses,  watched 
that  the  milking  was  thoroughly  done,  and  gave 
orders  for  the  day's  work.  Then  the  great  bell 
clanged  once,  and  he  and  all  the  men  hurried 
into  the  house,  where,  sitting  at  one  long  table 
in  the  kitchen,  they  ate  the  breakfast  Margaret 
and  the  hired  girls  brought  to  them,  piping  hot 
from  the  stove.  After  that  they  scattered,  driv 
ing  down  the  farm  lanes  to  the  fields,  while  the 
sun  rose,  and  the  meadows,  sparkling  with  dew, 
scented  the  air  with  clover. 

The  sun  rose  higher,  pouring  its  heat  down 
upon  them  as  they  worked,  and  a  shrill,  whirring 
noise  rose  from  all  the  tiny  insects  in  the  grass, 
a  note  like  the  voice  of  the  heat.  Coats  and 
vests  came  off,  and  were  tossed  in  the  fence  cor 
ners;  sleeves  were  rolled  up,  shirts  opened  wide 
at  the  neck. 

"Whew!  it's  hot!"  said  Henry,  stopping  to 
wipe  the  sweat  from  his  face.  "Where's  the 
water  jug?  Jim,  what  say  you  run  and  bring 
it  up?  Let's  have  a  drink  before  we  go  on." 

So  they  worked  through  the  mornings,  stop 
ping  gladly  enough  when  the  great  bell  clanged 
out  the  welcome  news  that  Margaret  and  the 
girls  had  prepared  the  huge  dinner  their  appe 
tites  demanded. 

In  the  afternoons  Henry,   on  the  little  gray 


36       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

mare,  rode  to  the  far  fields  for  a  diplomatic,  au 
thoritative  word  with  the  men  plowing  there,  or 
perhaps  he  went  a  little  farther,  and  bargained 
with  the  next  neighbor  for  a  likely  looking  year 
ling  heifer. 

Then  back  at  night  to  the  big  farm-yard,  where 
the  cows  must  be  milked,  the  horses  watered,  fed 
and  everything  made  comfortable  and  safe  for 
the  night. 

It  was  a  very  different  life  from  that  in  the 
machine  shop,  and  Henry  Ford  thought,  when  he 
pored  over  his  mechanic  journals  by  the  sit 
ting-room  lamp  in  the  evenings,  that  he  was 
wasting  precious  time.  But  he  was  learning  a 
great  many  things  he  would  find  useful  later. 

Margaret  Ford  was  by  this  time  a  healthy,  at 
tractive  young  woman,  with  all  the  affairs  of  the 
household  and  dairy  well  in  hand.  The  social 
affairs  of  the  community  began  to  center  around 
her.  In  the  evenings  the  young  men  of  the 
neighborhood  rode  over  to  propose  picnics  and 
hay-rides;  after  church  on  Sundays  a  dozen 
young  people  would  come  trooping  out  to  the 
farm  with  her,  and  Margaret  would  put  a  white 
apron  over  her  best  dress  and  serve  a  big  coun 
try  dinner. 

They  had  a  rollicking  time  in  the  grassy  front 
yards  afterwards,  or  out  in  the  orchard  when 
the  plums  were  ripe.  Late  in  the  afternoon  they 
separated  somehow  into  pairs,  as  young  people 


BACK  TO  THE  FARM  37 

will  do,  and  walked  the  three  miles  to  church 
for  the  evening  services. 

It  may  be  imagined  that  the  girls  of  the  neigh 
borhood  were  interested  when  Henry  appeared 
in  church  again,  now  a  good-looking  young  man 
of  twenty-one,  back  from  the  city.  The  social 
popularity  of  the  Ford  place  must  have  increased 
considerably.  On  this  point  Ford  is  discreetly 
silent,  but  it  does  not  require  any  great  effort  of 
fancy  to  see  him  as  he  must  have  looked  then, 
through  the  eyes  of  the  Greenfield  girls,  an  alert, 
muscular  fellow,  with  a  droll  humor  and  a  whim 
sical  smile.  Moreover,  the  driver  of  the  finest 
horses  in  the  neighborhood,  and  one  of  the  heirs 
to  the  big  farm. 

However,  he  is  outspoken  enough  about  his 
own  attitude.  He  did  not  care  for  girls. 

Like  most  men  with  a  real  interest,  he  kept  for 
a  long  time  the  small  boy  opinion  of  them. 
"Girls  ?— huh !  What  are  they  good  for  ?" 

He  was  interested  in  machines.  He  wanted 
to  get  back  to  Detroit,  where  he  could  take  up 
again  his  plans  for  that  mammoth  watch  fac 
tory. 

In  a  few  weeks  he  had  brought  the  farm  up 
to  its  former  running  order,  the  crops  were  doing 
well  and  the  hired  men  had  learned  that  there 
was  a  boss  at  the  head  of  affairs.  Henry  had  a 
little  more  time  to  spend  in  the  shop.  He  found 
in  one  corner  of  it  the  absurd  steam  engine  he 


38       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

had  built  five  years  before,  and  one  day  he  started 
it  up  and  ran  it  around  the  yard. 

It  was  a  weird-looking  affair,  the  high  wagon 
wheels  warped  and  wobbly,  the  hybrid  engine  on 
top  sputtering  and  wheezing  and  rattling,  but 
none  the  less  running,  in  a  cloud  of  smoke  and 
sparks.  He  had  a  hearty  laugh  at  it  and  aban 
doned  it. 

His  father  grew  better  slowly,  but  week  by 
week  Henry  was  approaching  the  time  when  he 
could  return  to  the  work  he  liked. 

Late  summer  came  with  all  the  work  of  get 
ting  in  the  crops.  The  harvest  crew  arrived 
from  the  next  farm,  twenty  men  of  them,  and 
Henry  was  busy  in  the  fields  from  morning  to 
night.  When,  late  in  October,  the  last  work  of 
the  summer  was  done  and  the  fields  lay  bare  and 
brown,  waiting  for  the  snow,  Margaret  Ford 
gave  a  great  harvest  supper  with  a  quilting  bee 
in  the  afternoon  and  corn  husking  in  the  evening. 

All  the  neighbors  came  from  miles  around. 
The  big  barns  were  crowded  with  their  horses 
and  rows  of  them  were  tied  under  the  sheds. 
In  the  house  the  quilting  frames  were  spread  in 
the  big  attic,  and  all  afternoon  the  women  sewed 
and  talked.  In  the  evening  the  men  arrived  and 
then  the  long  supper  table  was  spread  with  Mar 
garet's  cooking — hams,  sausages,  fried  chickens, 
a  whole  roast  pig,  pans  of  beans  and  succotash, 
huge  loaves  of  home-made  bread,  pats  of  butter, 
cheese,  cakes,  pies,  puddings,  doughnuts,  pitch- 


BACK  TO  THE  FARM  39 

ers  of  milk  and  cidei; — good  things  which  dis 
appeared  fast  enough  before  the  plying  knives 
and  forks,  in  bursts  of  laughter,  while  jokes  were 
called  from  end  to  end  of  the  table  and  young 
couples  blushed  under  the  chaffing  of  their  neigh 
bors. 

Clara  Bryant  was  one  of  the  guests.  Her  fa 
ther  was  a  prosperous  farmer  who  lived  eight 
miles  from  the  Ford  place  and  Henry  had 
scarcely  seen  her  that  summer.  That  night  they 
sat  side  by  side  and  he  noticed  the  red  in  her 
cheeks  and  the  way  she  laughed. 

After  supper  there  was  corn  husking  in  the  big 
barn,  where  each  young  man  tried  to  find  the  red 
ears  that  gave  him  permission  to  kiss  one  of  the 
girls,  and  still  later  they  danced  on  the  floor  of 
the  hay-barn  while  the  fiddler  called  the  figures 
of  the  old  square  dances  and  the  lanterns  cast 
a  flickering  light  on  the  dusty  mounds  of  hay. 

The  next  week  Henry  might  have  returned  to 
Detroit  and  to  the  waiting  project  of  the  watch 
factory,  but  he  did  not.  He  thought  of  Clara 
Bryant  and  realized  that  his  prejudice  against 
girls  was  unreasonable. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  ROAD  TO  HYMEN 

WITH  William  Ford's  complete  recovery  and 
the  coming  of  the  long,  half-idle  winter  of  the 
country  there  was  no  apparent  reason  why  Henry 
Ford  should  not  return  to  his  work  in  the  ma 
chine  shops.  The  plans  for  the  watch  factory, 
never  wholly  abandoned,  might  be  carried  out. 

But  Henry  stayed  at  home  on  the  farm.  Grad 
ually  it  became  apparent  to  the  neighborhood  that 
Ford's  boy  had  got  over  his  liking  for  city  life. 
Farmers  remarked  to  each  other,  while  they  sat 
in  their  granaries  husking  corn,  that  Henry  had 
come  to  his  senses  and  knew  when  he  was  well 
off;  he'd  have  his  share  in  as  good  a  farm  as  any 
man  could  want  some  day ;  there  was  no  need  for 
him  to  get  out  and  hustle  in  Detroit. 

Probably  there  were  moments  when  Henry 
himself  shared  the  prevailing  opinion;  his  in 
terest  in  mechanics  was  as  great  as  ever,  but — 
there  was  Clara  Bryant. 

He  made  a  few  trips  to  Detroit,  with  an  inten 
tion  which  seemed  to  him  earnest  enough  to  re 
vive  the  plans  for  the  watch  factory,  but  the 
thought  of  her  was  always  tugging  at  his  mind, 
urging  him  to  come  back  to  Greenfield.  His  ef- 

40 


THE  ROAD  TO  HYMEN  41 

forts  came  to  nothing,  and  he  soon  lost  interest 
in  them. 

He  was  in  his  early  twenties  then.  His  ambi 
tion  had  not  yet  centered  about  a  definite  pur 
pose,  and  already  it  had  met  the  worst  enemy 
of  ambition — love.  It  was  a  choice  between  his 
work  and  the  girl.  The  girl  won,  and  ten  mil 
lion  fifty-cent  Ford  watches  were  lost  to  the 
world. 

"I've  decided  not  to  go  back  to  Detroit,"  Henry 
announced  to  the  family  at  breakfast  one  day. 

"I  thought  you'd  come  around  to  seeing  it 
that  way,"  his  father  said.  "You  can  do  better 
here  in  the  long  run  than  you  can  in  the  city.  If 
you  want  to  take  care  of  the  stock  I'll  let  one  of 
the  men  go  and  pay  you  his  wages  this  winter." 

"All  right,"  Henry  said. 

His  work  as  a  machinist  seemed  to  all  of  them 
only  an  episode,  now  definitely  ended. 

He  settled  into  the  work  of  the  farm  as  though 
he  had  never  left  it.  Rising  in  the  cold,  lamp- 
lit  mornings  while  the  window  panes  showed  only 
a  square  of  darkness,  sparkling  with  frost  crys 
tals,  he  built  up  the  kitchen  fire  for  Margaret. 
Then,  with  a  lantern  in  his  hand  and  milk  pails 
clanking  on  his  arm,  plowed  his  way  through 
the  snow  to  the  barns. 

A  red  streak  was  showing  in  the  eastern  hori 
zon;  buildings  and  fences,  covered  with  snow, 
showed  odd  shapes  in  the  gray  dawn;  his  breath 
hung  like  smoke  on  the  frosty  air. 


42       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Inside  the  barns  the  animals  stirred;  a  horse 
stamped;  a  cow  rose  lumberingly;  old  Rover 
barked  when  he  heard  Henry's  hand  on  the  door 
fastening.  Henry  hung  his  lantern  on  a  nail  and 
set  to  work.  He  pitched  down  hay  and  huge 
forks ful  of  straw;  he  measured  out  rations  of 
bran  and  corn  and  oats ;  he  milked  the  cows,  stop 
ping  before  he  carried  the  brimming  pails  to  the 
house  to  pour  out  some  of  the  warm,  sweet  smell 
ing  milk  for  Rover  and  the  cats. 

Back  in  the  kitchen  Margaret  had  set  the  table 
for  breakfast.  She  was  standing  at  the  stove  fry 
ing  sausages  and  turning  corn  cakes.  The  other 
boys  came  tramping  in  from  poultry  yards  and 
hog  pens.  They  took  turns  at  the  tin  washbasin 
set  on  a  bench  on  the  back  porch,  and  then  in  to 
breakfast  with  hearty  appetites. 

Afterward  they  husked  corn  in  the  big  gran 
aries,  or  shelled  it,  ready  to  take  to  mill;  they 
cleaned  the  barn  stalls,  whitewashed  the  hen 
houses,  sorted  the  apples  in  the  cellar.  In  the 
shop  Henry  worked  at  the  farm  tools,  sharpen 
ing  the  plows,  refitting  the  harrows  with  teeth, 
oiling  and  cleaning  the  mowing  machines. 

After  supper,  when  he  had  finished  the  day's 
work,  milked  the  cows  again,  filled  the  racks  in 
the  calves'  yard  with  hay,  spread  deep  beds  of 
straw  for  the  horses,  seen  that  everything  was 
snug  and  comfortable  about  the  big  barns,  he  sad 
dled  the  little  bay  and  rode  six  miles  to  the  Bryant 
farm. 


THE  ROAD  TO  HYMEN  43 

It  was  a  courtship  which  did  not  run  any  too 
smoothly.  Henry  was  not  the  only  Greenfield 
farmer's  son  who  admired  Clara  Bryant,  and  she 
was  minded  to  divide  her  favor  evenly  among 
them  until  some  indefinite  time  in  the  future, 
when,  as  she  said,  "she  would  see."  Often 
enough  Henry  found  another  horse  tied  to  the 
hitching  post,  and  another  young  man  inside  the 
house  making  himself  agreeable  to  Clara. 

Then,  welcomed  heartily  enough  by  her  big, 
jovial  father,  he  would  spend  the  evening  talk 
ing  politics  with  him  while  Clara  and  his  rival 
popped  corn  or  roasted  apples  on  the  hearth. 

But  Henry  built  that  winter  a  light  sleigh, 
painted  red,  balanced  on  cushiony  springs,  slip 
ping  over  the  snow  on  smooth  steel  runners.  No 
girl  in  Greenfield  could  have  resisted  the  offer  of 
a  ride  in  it. 

In  the  evenings  when  the  moon  was  full  Clara 
and  Henry,  warmly  wrapped  in  fur  robes,  flashed 
down  the  snowy  roads  in  a  chime  of  sleighbells. 
The  fields  sparkled  white  on  either  hand,  here 
and  there  lights  gleamed  from  farm  houses. 
Then  the  sleigh  slipped  'into  the  woods,  still  and 
dark,  except  where  the  topmost  branches  shone 
silver  in  the  moonlight,  and  the  road  stretched 
ahead  like  a  path  of  white  velvet.  Their  passing 
made  no  sound  on  the  soft  snow. 

There  were  skating  parties,  too,  where  Henry 
and  Clara,  mittened  hand  in  hand,  swept  over 
the  ice  in  long,  smooth  flight,  their  skates  ringing. 


44       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Or  it  happened  that  Henry  stood  warming  his 
hands  at  the  bank  and  watched  Clara  skating 
away  with  some  one  else,  and  thought  bitter 
things. 

Somewhere,  between  farm  work  and  court 
ship,  he  found  time  to  keep  up  with  his  mechan 
ics'  trade  journals,  for  his  interest  in  machinery 
was  still  strong,  but  he  planned  nothing  new  at 
this  time.  All  his  constructive  imagination  was 
diverted  into  another  channel. 

More  than  the  loss  of  the  Ford  watches  is 
chargeable  to  that  laughing,  rosy  country  girl  who 
could  not  make  up  her  mind  to  choose  between 
her  suitors.  The  winter  passed  and  Henry,  torn 
between  two  interests,  had  accomplished  little 
with  either. 

Spring  and  the  spring  work  came,  plowing, 
harrowing,  sowing,  planting.  From  long  before 
dawn  until  the  deepening  twilight  hid  the  fields 
Henry  was  hard  at  work.  Until  the  pressure  of 
farm  work  was  over  he  could  see  Clara  only  on 
Sundays.  Then  summer  arrived,  with  picnics 
and  the  old  custom  of  bringing  a  crowd  of  young 
people  out  from  church  for  Sunday  dinner  at  the 
Fords'.  Now  and  then  there  were  excursions  up 
to  Detroit  for  an  outing  on  the  lake. 

By  the  end  of  that  summer  it  was  generally 
accepted  among  the  Greenfield  young  folks  that 
Henry  Ford  was  "going  with"  Clara  Bryant. 
But  she  must  still  have  been  elusive,  for  another 
winter  passed  with  nothing  definitely  decided. 


THE  ROAD  TO  HYMEN  45 

The  third  spring  of  Henry's  stay  on  the  farm 
arrived.  Henry  went  over  his  bank  account,  a 
respectable  sum,  made  up  of  his  earnings  on  the 
farm  and  a  few  ventures  in  cattle  buying  and 
selling. 

"Well,  father,"  he  said  one  day,  "I  guess  I'll 
be  getting  married." 

"All  right,"  his  father  said.  "She's  a  good, 
capable  girl,  I  guess.  I'll  give  you  that  south 
forty,  and  you  can  have  lumber  enough  from  the 
timber  lot  to  build  a  house  when  you  get  ready." 

Apparently  Henry  had  made  up  his  mind  to 
settle  the  matter.  No  doubt,  behind  the  ardor 
he  showed  Clara  there  was  an  unconscious  feel 
ing  that  he  had  spent  enough  time  in  courtship; 
he  was  impatient  to  get  back  to  his  other  inter 
ests,  to  have  again  an  orderly,  smooth  routine  of 
life,  with  margins  of  time  for  machinery. 

In  April  he  and  Clara  went  up  to  Detroit  and 
were  married.  A  couple  of  weeks  later  they  re 
turned  to  Greenfield,  Clara  with  plans  for  the 
new  house  on  the  south  forty  already  sketched 
in  a  tablet  in  her  suitcase ;  Henry  with  a  bundle  of 
mechanics'  trade  journals,  and  the  responsibility 
of  caring  for  a  wife. 

"A  wife  helps  a  man  more  than  any  one  else," 
he  says  to-day.  And  adds,  with  his  whimsical 
twinkle,  "she  criticizes  him  more." 


CHAPTER  VIII 

MAKING   A    FARM    EFFICIENT 

THE  young  couple  went  first  to  the  Fords' 
place,  where  the  big  roomy  house  easily  spared 
rooms  for  them,  and  Margaret  and  her  father 
gave  them  a  hearty  welcome.  Clara,  having 
brought  her  belongings  from  her  old  home,  put 
on  her  big  work-apron  and  helped  Margaret  in 
the  kitchen  and  dairy. 

Henry  was  out  in  the  fields  early,  working 
hard  to  get  the  crops  planted.  Driving  the  p1?w- 
share  deep  into  the  rich,  black  loam,  hclamg  it 
steady  while  the  furrow  rolled  back  under  his 
feet,  he  whistled  to  himself. 

He  was  contented.  The  farm  work  was  well 
in  hand;  his  forty  would  bring  in  an  ample  in 
come  from  the  first  year;  in  the  house  his  rosy 
little  wife  was  busy  making  the  best  butter  in 
the  whole  neighborhood.  He  revolved  in  his 
mind  vague  plans  for  making  a  better  plow  than 
the  one  he  was  handling ;  he  remembered  noticing 
in  his  latest  English  magazine  an  article  covering 
the  very  principle  he  would  use. 

In  the  evening,  after  the  last  of  the  chores  was 
done,  he  settled  himself  at  the  table  in  the  sit- 

46 


MAKING  A  FARM  EFFICIENT       47 

ting-room,  moved  the  big  lamp  nearer  and  opened 
the  magazine.  But  Clara  was  busy  correcting 
the  plans  for  the  new  house;  she  must  have  the 
lamp  light,  too.  Henry  moved  the  lamp  back. 

"Would  you  have  the  kitchen  here,  or  here? 
This  way  I  could  have  windows  on  three  sides, 
but  the  other  way  I'd  have  a  larger  pantry,"  said 
Clara,  stopping  to  chew  her  pencil. 

"Fix  it  exactly  to  suit  yourself.  It's  your 
house,  and  I'll  build  it  just  as  you  say/'  Henry 
replied,  turning  a  page. 

"But  I  want  your  advice — and  I  can't  see  how 
to  get  this  back  porch  in  without  making  the  bed 
rooms  too  small,"  Clara  complained.  "I  want 
this  house  just  so — 'and  if  I  put  the  chimney 
where  I  want  it  to  come  in  the  kitchen,  it  will  be 
in  the  wrong  end  of  the  sitting-room,  best  I  can 
do.  Oh,  let  those  horrid  papers  alone,  and  help 
me  out!" 

Henry  let  the  horrid  papers  alone  and  bent  his 
head  over  the  problems  of  porch  and  pantry  and 
fireplace. 

When  the  pressure  of  spring  work  was  over, 
he  set  to  work  a  gang  of  men,  cutting  down  se 
lected  trees  in  the  timber  lot  and  hauling  them 
down  to  the  little  sawmill  which  belonged  to  his 
father.  There  he  sawed  them  into  boards  of  the 
lengths  and  sizes  he  needed  and  stocked  them  in 
neat  piles  to  season  and  dry.  From  the  shorter 
pieces  of  timber  he  split  "shakes,"  or  homemade 


48       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

shingles,  and  stacked  them,  log-cabin  fashion. 
He  was  preparing  to  build  his  first  house. 

It  rose  little  by  little  through  that  summer. 
Henry  built  it  himself,  helped  by  one  of  the  hired 
men.  It  was  a  good,  substantial,  Middle- Western 
home,  32  x  32  feet  and  containing  seven  rooms 
and  a  roomy  attic.  In  the  evenings,  after  sup 
per,  dishwashing  and  the  chores  at  the  barn  were 
finished,  he  and  Clara  strolled  over  in  the  twilight 
to  inspect  the  day's  progress. 

They  climbed  together  over  the  loose  boards 
which  made  temporary  floors,  looked  at  the  skel 
eton  partitions  of  studding,  planned  where  the 
stoves  should  be  set  and  what  kind  of  paper 
should  be  chosen  for  the  walls.  Then  they  walked 
around  the  outside,  imagined  with  pride  how  well 
the  house  would  look  when  the  siding  was  on  and 
painted  white,  and  planned  where  the  flower  beds 
should  be  in  the  front  yard. 

"Let's  be  getting  on  back,"  said  Henry.  "I 
saw  an  article  in  that  French  magazine  that  came 
to-day  about  a  Frenchman  who  invented  some 
kind  of  a  carriage  that  runs  by  itself,  without 
horses — sort  of  a  steam  engine  to  pull  it." 

"Did  you?"  said  Clara.  "How  interesting! 
Oh,  look !  The  moon's  coming  up." 

They  loitered  back  through  the  clover  fields, 
sweet  smelling  in  the  dew,  climbed  over  the  stile 
into  the  apple  orchard,  where  the  leaves  were  sil 
ver  and  black  in  the  moonlight,  and  so  came 
slowly  home.  Margaret  had  cut  a  watermelon, 


MAKING  A  FARM  EFFICIENT       49 

cooled  in  a  basket  in  the  well,  and  all  the  family 
sat  on  the  back  porch  eating  it. 

Long  after  midnight,  when  every  one  else  was 
sound  asleep,  the  lamp  was  burning  in  the  sit 
ting-room,  and  Henry  was  reading  that  article 
about  the  horseless  carriage.  The  idea  fascinated 
him. 

The  new  house  was  finished  late  in  the  fall. 
Clara  had  made  a  trip  to  Detroit  to  purchase  fur 
niture,  and  all  summer  she  had  been  working  on 
patchwork  quilts  and  crocheted  tidies.  When 
everything  was  ready,  the  sitting-room  bright 
with  new  carpet  and  shining  varnished  furniture, 
the  new  range  installed  in  the  kitchen,  the  cellar 
stocked  with  apples,  vegetables,  canned  fruits, 
Henry  and  Clara  moved  into  their  own  home. 
They  were  proud  of  it. 

"It's  a  fine  place  yet,  as  good  as  anybody  could 
want,"  Henry  Ford  says  now.  "We  still  have 
it,  and  we  like  to  go  down  there  in  the  summers 
and  stay  awhile.  All  the  furniture  is  there,  ex 
actly  as  it  was  then.  I  wouldn't  ask  any  better 
place  to  live." 

It  must  have  been  a  happy  time  for  both  of 
them.  They  had  a  comfortable  home,  plenty  to 
eat  and  wear,  they  were  surrounded  by  friends. 
There  was  a  simple  neighborly  spirit,  a  true 
democracy,  in  that  little  country  community. 
There  were  no  very  poor  families  there ;  no  very 
rich  ones;  every  one  had  plenty,  and  wanted  no 
more. 


50       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Henry's  hired  men  ate  at  the  table  with  him, 
slept  under  the  same  roof,  called  him  "Hen"  as 
a  matter  of  course,  just  as  he  called  them  "Hi" 
and  "Dave."  They  worked  together  to  plant, 
care  for  and  harvest  the  crops.  Their  interests 
were  the  same,  and  if  at  the  end  of  the  year 
Henry  had  a  more  improved  farm  to  show  for 
the  year's  work,  it  was  the  only  difference  be 
tween  them.  He  had  lived  no  better,  spent  no 
more,  than  the  others. 

It  was  in  those  years  that  he  laid  the  founda 
tion  for  his  philosophy  of  life. 

He  found  that  the  work  of  the  farm  progressed 
faster  and  produced  more  when  every  one  worked 
together  with  a  good  will,  each  doing  his  own 
share  and  doing  it  well.  He  found  that  men, 
like  horses,  did  their  best  when  they  were  well 
fed,  contented  and  not  overworked.  He  saw  that 
one  unruly  horse,  or  one  surly,  lazy  man,  delayed 
the  work  of  the  whole  farm,  hindered  all  the 
others. 

"The  only  plan  that  will  work  out  well  in  the 
long  run  is  a  plan  that  is  best  for  every  one  con 
cerned,"  he  decided.  "Hurting  the  other  fellow 
is  bound  to  hurt  me  sooner  or  later." 

He  was  a  good  farmer.  His  mechanical,  or 
derly  mind  arranged  the  work  so  that  it  was  done 
smoothly,  and  on  time,  without  overworking 
any  one  or  leaving  any  one  idle.  His  thrifty  in 
stincts  saved  labor  and  time  just  as  they  saved 
the  barn  manure  to  spread  on  the  fields,  or 


MAKING  A  FARM  EFFICIENT       51 

planned  for  the  turning  in  of  the  last  crop  of 
clover  to  enrich  the  soil. 

His  granaries  were  well  filled  in  the  fall,  his 
stock  was  sleek  and  fat,  fetching  top  prices.  Clara 
kept  the  house  running  smoothly,  the  pantry  filled 
with  good,  simple  food,  the  cellar  shelves  stocked 
with  preserves  and  jams  for  winter. 

In  the  evenings  Henry  got  out  his  mechanics' 
journals  and  pored  over  them,  while  Clara  sewed 
or  mended.  He  found  now  and  then  a  mention 
of  the  horseless  carriage. 

"That  looks  to  me  like  a  good  idea.  If  I  was 
in  Detroit  now,  where  I  could  get  a  good  machine 
shop,  I  believe  I  could  do  something  along  that 
line  myself,"  he  said. 

"Probably  you  could,"  his  wife  replied,  rock 
ing  comfortably.  "But  what's  the  use?  We've 
got  everything  here  we  need." 

"Yes;  but  I'd  just  like  to  try  what  I  could  do," 
Henry  said  restlessly. 

A  few  days  later  he  inspected  his  farm  shop 
and  announced  that  he  was  going  up  to  Detroit 
for  a  day  to  get  some  materials. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  LURE  OF  THE  MACHINE  SHOPS 

IT  was  an  unconscious  subterfuge,  that  state 
ment  of  Henry  Ford's  that  he  was  going  up  to 
Detroit  to  get  material.  He  knew  what  he 
wanted;  sitting  by  the  red-covered  table  in  his 
own  dining  and  sitting  room  some  evening  after 
Clara  had  cleared  away  the  supper  dishes  he 
could  have  written  out  his  order,  article  by  article, 
exactly  what  he  needed,  and  two  days  later  it 
would  have  arrived  by  express. 

But  Henry  wanted  to  get  back  to  Detroit.  He 
was  tired  of  the  farm.  Those  years  of  quiet, 
comfortable  country  living  among  his  Greenfield 
neighbors  were  almost  finished.  They  had  given 
him  his  viewpoint  on  human  relations,  they  had 
saved  his  character,  in  the  formative  period,  from 
the  distorting  pressure  of  the  struggle  of  man 
against  man  in  the  city.  They  had  been,  from 
the  standpoint  of  Henry  Ford,  the  man,  perhaps 
the  most  valuable  years  in  his  life. 

At  that  time  he  saw  in  them  only  an  endless 
repetition  of  tasks  which  had  no  great  appeal  for 
him,  a  recurring  cycle  of  sowing,  tilling,  harvest 
ing.  He  thought  he  was  accomplishing  nothing. 
A  little  more  money  in  the  bank,  a  few  more 

52 


LURE  OF  THE  MACHINE  SHOPS    53 

acres  added  to  the  farm — that  was  all,  and  it  did 
not  interest  him.  Money  never  did.  His  pas 
sion  was  machinery. 

So  he  gave  his  orders  to  the  hired  man,  pock 
eted  a  list  of  things  to  buy  for  Clara,  and  caught 
the  early  train  to  Detroit  that  morning  with  a 
feeling  of  keen  anticipation.  He  meant  to  spend 
one  whole  day  in  machine  shops. 

From  the  station  in  Detroit  he  hurried  direct 
to  the  James  Flower  Iron  Works.  The  broad, 
busy  streets,  jammed  with  carriages  and  drays, 
the  crowds  of  hurrying  people,  did  not  hold  his 
attention  for  a  moment,  but  when  he  came  into 
the  noisy,  dirty  turmoil  of  the  machine  shop  he 
was  in  his  element  again.  He  took  in  a  dozen 
details  at  a  glance.  Scarcely  a  change  had  been 
made  since  he  had  first  seen  the  place  years  be 
fore  when  he  was  a  boy  of  sixteen  looking  for  a 
job. 

The  old  foreman  was  gone  and  one  of  the 
men  who  had  worked  beside  Henry  in  those  days 
was  in  charge. 

"Well,  hello  there,  Ford!"  he  said  heartily. 
"What're  you  doing  these  days?  Not  looking 
for  a  job,  are  you?" 

"No,  I'm  farming  now,"  Ford  replied.  "Just 
thought  I'd  drop  in  and  have  a  look  around." 

Together  they  wandered  over  the  works,  and 
the  foreman,  shouting  to  make  himself  heard  in 
the  clanging,  pounding  uproar,  pointed  out  here 
and  there  a  new  device,  an  improved  valve,  a 


54       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

different  gearing.  Ford  saw  it  all  with  interest, 
he  was  wider  awake,  more  alive  than  he  had  been 
for  months. 

When  he  was  leaving  the  shop  some  time  later 
he  had  a  sudden  expansive  impulse  which  broke 
through  his  customary  reticence. 

"I'm  thinking  of  building  an  engine  myself,'* 
he  said.  "A  little  one,  to  use  on  the  farm.  I 
figure  ,1  can  work  something  out  that  will  take 
the  place  of  some  of  my  horses/' 

The  foreman  looked  at  Ford  in  amazement. 
It  is  hard  to  realize  now  how  astounding  such  an 
idea  must  have  seemed  to  him.  Here  was  a  man 
who  proposed  to  take  a  locomotive  into  his  corn 
field  and  set  it  to  plowing !  The  wild  impossibil 
ity  of  the  plan  would  have  staggered  any  rea 
sonable  person.  The  foreman  decided  that  this 
was  one  of  Ford's  quiet  jokes.  He  laughed  ap 
preciatively. 

"Great  idea!"  he  applauded.  "All  you'll  need 
then'll  be  a  machine  to  give  milk,  and  you'll  have 
the  farm  complete.  Well,  come  around  any  time, 
glad  to  see  you." 

Ford  made  the  rounds  of  Detroit's  machine 
shops  that  day,  but  he  did  not  mention  his  idea 
again.  It  was  gradually  shaping  itself  in  his 
mind,  in  part  a  revival  of  his  boyish  plan  for 
that  first  steam  engine  he  had  built  of  scraps  from 
his  father's  shop,  in  part  adapted  from  the  article 
he  had  read  about  the  horseless  carriage. 

He   was   obliged   to   keep   enough   horses  to 


LURE  OF  THE  MACHINE  SHOPS    55 

handle  the  work  of  the  farm  when  it  was  heavi 
est  ;  in  the  slack  season  and  during  the  winter  the 
extra  animals  were  necessarily  idle,  wasting  food 
and  barn  space,  and  waste  of  any  kind  was  an 
irritation  to  his  methodical  mind.  It  seemed  to 
him  that  a  machine  could  be  built  which  would 
do  a  great  part  of  the  horses'  work  in  the  fields 
and  cost  nothing  while  not  in  use. 

That  the  undertaking  was  revolutionary,  vision 
ary,  probably  ridiculous  to  other  people,  did  not 
deter  him;  he  thought  he  could  do  it,  and  that 
was  enough. 

"Precedents  and  prejudice  are  the  worst  things 
in  this  world/'  he  says  to-day.  "Every  genera 
tion  has  its  own  problem ;  it  ought  to  find  its  own 
solutions.  There  is  no  use  in  our  living  if  we 
can't  do  things  better  than  our  fathers  did." 

That  belief  had  been  steadily  growing  in  him 
while  his  inherited  thrift  and  his  machine-ideas 
improved  on  the  farming  methods  of  Greenfield; 
it  crystallized  into  a  creed  when  his  old  friend 
laughed  at  his  idea  of  replacing  horses  with  a 
machine. 

He  had  visited  the  shops  which  interested  him, 
ordered  the  material  he  wanted,  and  was  on  his 
way  to  the  station  to  take  the  train  home  when  he 
remembered  the  shopping  list  Mrs.  Ford  had 
given  him,  and  her  repeated  injunctions  to  attend 
to  it  "the  very  first  thing  he  did." 

With  the  usual  exclamation  of  a  husband  saved 
by  a  sudden  thought  on  the  very  brink  of  domes- 


56       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

tic  catastrophe,  Henry  Ford  turned  and  hurried 
back  to  make  those  purchases.  Aided  by  a  sym 
pathetic  clerk  at  the  ribbon  counter,  he  completed 
them  satisfactorily,  and  came  out  of  the  store, 
laden  with  bundles,  just  at  the  moment  that  De 
troit's  pride,  a  new  steam-propelled  fire  engine, 
came  puffing  around  the  corner. 

It  was  going  at  the  rate  of  fifteen  miles  an 
hour,  with  impressive  clatter  and  clang,  pouring 
clouds  of  black  smoke  from  the  stack.  Detroit's 
citizens  crowded  the  sidewalks  to  view  it  as  it 
went  by.  Henry  Ford,  gripping  his  bundles, 
stood  on  the  curb  and  looked  at  it.  Here  was 
his  first  chance  to  see  a  steam  engine  built  to 
run  without  a  prepared  roadbed  and  rails. 

It  was  the  original  of  one  of  those  pictures  we 
sometimes  see  now  with  a  smile,  murmuring, 
"How  quaint!"  A  huge  round  boiler,  standing 
high  in  the  back,  supplied  fully  half  its  bulk. 
Ford  made  a  hasty  calculation  of  the  probable 
weight  of  water  it  carried,  in  proportion  to  its 
power. 

The  result  appalled  him.  He  thoughtfully 
watched  the  engine  until  it  was  out  of  sight. 
Then  he  resumed  his  way  home.  On  the  train 
he  sat  in  deep  thought,  now  and  then  figuring  a 
little  on  the  back  of  an  old  envelope. 

"I  couldn't  get  that  steam  engine  out  of  my 
mind,"  he  says.  "What  an  awful  waste  of 
power!  The  weight  of  the  water  in  that  boiler 
bothered  me  for  weeks." 


CHAPTER  X 
"WHY  NOT  USE  GASOLINE?" 

ONE  sympathizes  with  young  Mrs.  Ford  dur 
ing  the  weeks  that  followed.  In  two  years  of 
marriage  she  had  learned  to  understand  her  hus 
band's  interests  and  moods  fairly  well;  she  had 
adjusted  herself  with  fewer  domestic  discords 
than  usual  to  the  simple  demands  of  his  good- 
humored,  methodical  temperament. 

She  had  begun  to  settle  into  a  pleasant,  accus 
tomed  routine  of  managing  her  house  and  poultry 
yard,  preparing  the  meals,  washing  the  dishes, 
spending  the  evenings  sewing,  while  Henry  read 
his  mechanics'  journals  on  the  other  side  of  the 
lamp. 

Now  everything  changed.  Henry  had  returned 
from  that  trip  to  Detroit  with  something  on  his 
mind.  In  reply  to  her  anxious  inquiries  he  told 
her  not  to  bother,  he  was  all  right — a  statement 
that  had  the  usual  effect  of  confirming  her  fears. 
She  was  sure  something  terrible  had  occurred, 
some  overwhelming  business  catastrophe — and 
Henry  was  keeping  it  from  her. 

From  the  kitchen  window  she  saw  him  sitting 
idly  on  the  horse-block  in  the  middle  of  the  fore- 

57 


58       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

noon,  twisting  a  straw  in  his  fingers  and  frown 
ing  intently  at  the  side  of  the  barn. 

Sometimes  after  supper,  instead  of  settling 
quietly  down  with  his  papers,  he  walked  up  and 
down,  up  and  down,  the  sitting-room,  with  his 
hands  behind  his  back  and  that  same  frown  on 
his  forehead.  At  last  she  could  endure  it  no 
longer.  She  begged  him  to  tell  her  the  worst. 

He  replied,  surprised,  that  it  was  a  steam  en 
gine — he  couldn't  figure  out  the  ratio  of  power  to 
weight  satisfactorily.  The  blame  thing  bothered 
him. 

"Oh,  is  that  all?"  Mrs.  Ford  said  indignantly. 
"Well,  I  wouldn't  bother  about  it  if  I  were  you. 
What  does  an  old  steam  engine  matter,  anyhow? 
Come  and  sit  down  and  forget  about  it." 

It  was  the  one  thing  Ford  could  not  do.  His 
mind,  once  started  on  the  project  of  building  an 
engine  to  use  on  the  farm,  remained  obstinately 
at  work  on  the  details.  He  spent  weeks  consid 
ering  them  one  by  one,  thinking  out  adaptations, 
new  devices,  in  an  effort  to  overcome  the  diffi 
culty. 

Still  he  could  not  see  how  to  construct  a  cheap 
engine  which  would  pull  across  his  soft  fields, 
carry  the  necessary  weight  of  water,  and  still  de 
velop  enough  free  power  to  be  useful. 

He  was  still  struggling  with  the  problem  three 
months  after  his  trip  to  Detroit. 

"I  declare  to  goodness,  I  don't  know  what's 
got  into  you,  Henry.  You  act  like  a  man  in  a 


"WHY  NOT  USE  GASOLINE?"       59 

dream  half  the  time,"  the  wife  said,  worried. 
"You  aren't  coming  down  with  a  fever,  are  you?" 

"I  should  say  not!"  Henry  replied  hastily,  with 
visions  of  brewed  snakeroot  and  wormwood.  "I 
feel  fine.  Where's  the  milk  pail?" 

He  took  it  and  his  lantern  and  hurried  out  to 
the  barn,  but  even  while  he  sat  on  the  three- 
legged  stool,  his  practiced  hands  sending  streams 
of  warm  milk  foaming  into  the  pail,  his  mind  re 
turned  to  that  problem  of  the  steam  engine.  He 
was  sure  a  machine  could  be  made  to  do  the  work 
of  horses;  he  was  confident  that  he  could  make 
it  if  he  persisted  long  enough. 

The  trouble  was  the  weight  of  the  water.  He 
must  have  it  to  make  steam ;  he  must  have  steam 
to  develop  power,  and  the  whole  power  was  re 
quired  to  haul  the  water.  It  looked  like  an  in 
exorable  circle.  He  went  over  it  again,  looking 
for  the  weak  spot  in  the  reasoning — and  sud 
denly  he  saw  it. 

Steam  was  not  necessary.  Why  not  use  gaso 
line? 

The  thought  opened  a  door  into  unknown  pos~ 
sibilities.  Up  to  that  time,  as  far  as  he  knew,  no 
one  had  ever  dreamed  of  a  self-propelling  gaso 
line  engine.  A  thousand  obstacles  rose  imme 
diately  before  his  mind — the  gearing,  the  drive, 
the  construction  of  the  engine  itself — a  dazzling 
array  of  problems  to  be  faced  and  solved. 

Difficulties  innumerable  stood  in  the  way  of 
his  carrying  out  the  idea — difficulties  apparently 


60       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

so  insurmountable  that  ninety-nine  men  in  a  hun 
dred  would  have  abandoned  the  idea  as  impossi 
ble  after  one  glance  at  them.  Henry  Ford  was 
the  hundredth  man.  They  were  mechanical  dif 
ficulties,  and  he  loved  mechanics.  He  was  eager 
for  the  struggle  with  them. 

"It  seemed  to  take  me  a  year  to  finish  the 
chores,  so  I  could  sit  down  some  place  and  figure 
it  out,"  he  says. 

He  finished  the  milking,  fed  the  waiting  circle 
of  gleaming-eyed  cats,  flashed  his  lantern  down 
the  rows  of  stalls  to  be  sure  the  horses  were  well 
fed  and  comfortable,  fastened  the  barn  doors 
and  hastened  into  the  house  with  the  milk.  Every 
moment  seemed  wasted  until  he  could  reach  the 
quiet  sitting-room,  spread  paper  and  pencils  in 
the  lamplight  and  begin  to  work  out  some  of  those 
problems.  He  had  never  disliked  the  chores  so 
much. 

From  that  time  his  distaste  for  farm  work 
grew.  Nature  would  not  delay  her  orderly  cycle 
because  Henry  Ford  wanted  to  spend  his  days 
in  the  little  farm  shop.  Weeds  sprang  up  and 
must  be  cut,  crops  ripened  and  must  be  harvested, 
morning  came  with  a  hundred  imperative  de 
mands  on  his  time  and  strength,  and  night 
brought  the  chores.  All  the  farm  tasks  were  to 
Ford  only  vexing  obstacles  in  his  way  to  his  real 
work,  and  they  kept  him  from  it  till  late  at  night. 

Then,  when  all  Greenfield  was  asleep,  and  Mrs. 
Ford,  after  a  long  struggle  to  keep  awake,  had 


"WHY  NOT  USE  GASOLINE?"      61 

gone  yawning  to  bed,  he  sat  alone  and  worked 
over  the  problem  of  his  gasoline  engine.  He  ran 
sacked  the  piles  of  mechanics'  journals  for  sug 
gestions  ;  where  they  failed  him  he  tried  to  think 
his  way  ahead  without  help. 

While  he  worked  through  the  night,  in  a  still 
ness  broken  only  by  the  crowing  of  a  rooster  in 
some  distant  farmyard  and  the  sputtering  of  the 
lamp,  the  possibilities  of  his  idea  gradually  grew 
in  his  mind.  He  was  not  an  imaginative  man — 
the  details  of  the  engine  absorbed  most  of  his  at 
tention — but  now  and  then  as  the  night  wore  on 
toward  morning  he  had  a  dim  understanding  of 
the  possibilities  of  horseless  transportation.  He 
thought  what  it  might  mean  to  the  world  if  every 
man  had  a  machine  to  carry  him  and  his  goods 
over  the  country  at  a  speed  of  twenty  or  even 
twenty-five  miles  an  hour.  It  was  a  fantastic 
vision,  he  admitted,  but  he  set  his  teeth  and  de 
clared  that  it  was  not  an  impossible  one. 

Sometimes  he  worked  all  night.  Usually  weari 
ness  overcame  him  in  the  small  hours  and  he  was 
forced  to  stop  and  go  through  another  day's 
work  on  the  farm  before  he  could  get  back  to  his 
real  interests  again. 

If  the  farm  was  to  prosper  he  must  give  it  his 
attention  every  day.  The  margin  of  time  it  al 
lowed  for  his  work  on  the  gasoline  engine 
plans  was  far  too  little.  By  the  end  of  that  sum 
mer  he  had  made  up  his  mind  that  he  could  not 
spare  his  time  for  the  farm.  He  told  his  wife 


62       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

that  he  had  decided  to  lease  it  to  his  brother  and 
move  to  Detroit. 

"My  goodness,  Henry,  what  for?  We're  do 
ing  well  here ;  I'm  sure  you're  going  ahead  faster 
than  any  one  in  the  neighborhood,"  she  said  in 
astonishment. 

"I  want  to  get  back  to  work  in  the  machine 
shops.  I  can't  do  any  work  on  my  gasoline  en 
gine  here.  Even  if  I  had  the  time  I  haven't  the 
equipment/'  he  explained. 

"Well,  I  must  say.  Here  we've  worked  hard, 
and  got  a  comfortable  home,  and  a  fine  farm, 
that  pays  more  every  year,  and  sixteen  head  of 
good  stock — and  you're  going  to  leave  it  all  for 
a  gasoline  engine  that  isn't  even  built.  I  don't 
see  what  you're  thinking  of,"  said  poor  Mrs. 
Ford,  confronted  thus  suddenly  with  the  prospect 
of  giving  up  all  her  accustomed  ways,  her  old 
friends,  her  big  house  with  its  stock  of  linens  and 
its  cellar  filled  with  good  things. 

"You  can't  begin  to  make  as  much  in  the  city 
as  you  do  here,"  she  argued  reasonably.  "And 
suppose  the  engine  doesn't  work,  after  all  ?" 

"It'll  work,  all  right.  I'm  going  to  keep  at 
it  till  it  does,"  Ford  said. 


CHAPTER  XI 

BACK  TO  DETROIT 

MRS.  FORD'S  opinion  was  now  shared  by  the 
whole  Greenfield  neighborhood  as  soon  as  it 
learned  Ford's  intention  of  leaving  his  fine,  pay 
ing  farm  and  moving  to  Detroit  to  work  in  a 
machine  shop. 

"You  had  this  notion  once  before,  you  know, 
when  you  were  a  youngster,"  his  father  reminded 
him.  "I  thought  you'd  made  up  your  mind  to 
stay  here,  where  you  can  make  a  good  living  and 
have  some  peace  and  comfort." 

He  listened  to  his  son's  explanation  of  the  pos 
sibilities  in  a  self-propelling  gasoline  engine  and 
he  shook  his  head. 

"I  guess  you  can  build  it  if  anybody  can,  but 
you  can't  ever  tell  about  these  inventions.  Looks 
to  me  you'd  better  stick  to  a  good  farm,  where 
you're  your  own  boss,  and  there's  always  plenty 
in  the  cupboard  whatever  happens,  instead  of  go 
ing  off  to  a  city  job.  You  may  build  that  con 
trivance  of  yours  and  then  again  you  may  not, 
and  look  how  you'll  be  living  in  the  meantime." 

But  Henry  was  firm,  with  a  determination 
which  is  called  obstinacy  when  it  goes  with  fail 
ure  and  great  will  power  when  it  is  coupled  with 

63 


64       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

success.  He  was  going  to  the  city.  That  settled 
it. 

After  her  first  protest  Mrs.  Ford  accepted  the 
situation  and  set  herself  with  what  philosophy 
she  might  to  packing  her  linen  and  wrapping  the 
furniture.  She  had  no  great  interest  in  the  gaso 
line  engine — machinery  in  general  was  to  her 
merely  something  greasy  and  whirring,  to  hold 
her  skirts  away  from — but  if  Henry  was  going  to 
Detroit,  of  course  she  was  going,  too,  and  she 
might  as  well  be  cheerful  about  it. 

The  rosy,  teasing  country  girl  who  had  kept 
Henry  Ford  from  his  beloved  machines  nearly 
five  years  before  by  her  laughing  refusal  to 
choose  between  her  suitors,  had  developed  into  a 
cheerful,  capable  little  housewife — the  kind  of 
woman  whose  place  is  in  the  home  because  there 
she  does  her  best  work. 

She  could  never  invent  a  gasoline  engine,  but 
she  was  an  ideal  person  to  take  care  of  Henry 
Ford  while  he  did  it,  to  keep  the  house  clean  and 
comfortable,  cook  good  meals,  cheer  him  a  bit 
when  he  was  depressed  and  never  have  "nerves." 
She  went  briskly  to  work  and  in  no  time  she  had 
packed  away  the  thousand  articles  that  meant 
home  to  her  and  they  stood  wrapped,  crated,  la 
beled,  ready  to  move  to  Detroit. 

Meantime  Ford  had  arranged  for  the  lease  of 
the  farm  and  for  the  storage  of  the  furniture  un 
til  he  should  have  found  a  house  in  the  city.  Mrs. 
Ford  was  going  there  with  him,  and  they  would 


BACK  TO  DETROIT  65 

live  in  a  boarding  house  until  he  got  a  job.  On 
the  last  morning  when  he  picked  up  the  telescope 
bags,  ready  to  start  to  the  station,  his  wife  went 
over  to  the  house  for  the  last  time  to  see  that 
everything  was  snug  and  safe  to  leave. 

Then  she  came  into  the  parlor  where  he  was 
waiting  and  looked  around  the  bare  room  stripped 
of  its  bright  Brussels  carpets,  lace  curtains  and 
shiny  furniture. 

"Well,  we'll  come  back  some  day,  won't  we," 
she  said,  "when  the  gasoline  engine  is  built  ?" 

She  had  spoken  for  the  first  time  a  phrase  they 
were  to  repeat  frequently,  with  every  accent  of 
expectation,  hope,  discouragement  and  irony, 
during  the  next  ten  years,  "When  the  gasoline 
engine  is  built!" 

A  crowd  of  their  friends  gathered  at  the  sta 
tion  to  say  good-by.  With  an  intention  of  being 
tactful,  they  avoided  any  mention  of  Henry's 
purpose  in  leaving  Greenfield. 

"Sorry  to  lose  you,  Ford.  Hope  you'll  be  com 
ing  back  before  long,"  they  said,  and  he  knew  the 
neighborhood  had  learned  of  his  intention  to  in 
vent  something  and  thought  him  suddenly  become 
a  fool. 

As  soon  as  they  reached  Detroit  and  found  a 
boarding  house  where  he  could  leave  his  wife  he 
started  out  to  get  a  job.  He  wanted  one  where 
he  could  learn  something  about  electricity.  So 
far  his  knowledge  of  it  was  purely  theoretical, 
gained  from  reading  and  thinking.  Electric 


66       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

lights  had  come  to  Detroit  since  he  left  it;  the 
Edison  Electric  Lighting  and  Power  Company 
had  established  three  power  stations  there.  He 
asked  nothing  better  than  a  chance  to  work  in 
one  of  them. 

Charles  Gilbert,  manager  of  the  plants,  was 
having  a  hard  time  that  morning.  By  one  of 
those  freaks  of  Fate  which  must  be  left  out  of 
any  fiction  plot  because  they  are  too  improbable, 
two  of  his  engines  had  chosen  that  day  to  break 
down  simultaneously.  One  of  the  engineers  who 
had  been  responsible  had  been  summarily  dis 
charged;  the  others  were  working  on  the  engine 
in  the  main  plant,  and  one  of  the  sub-stations 
was  entirely  out  of  commission,  with  no  prospect 
of  getting  to  work  on  it  until  the  next  day. 

Into  this  situation  Henry  Ford  walked,  and 
asked  for  a  job. 

"He  looked  to  me  like  any  tramp  engineer," 
Charles  Gilbert  says  to-day.  "A  young  fellow, 
not  very  husky-looking — more  of  a  slight,  wiry 
build.  You  wouldn't  have  noticed  him  at  all  in  a 
crowd.  He  talked  like  a  steady,  capable  fellow, 
but  if  he  had  come  in  on  any  other  day  I'd  have 
said  we  couldn't  use  him.  As  it  was,  I  thought  I 
might  as  well  give  him  a  chance." 

He  listened  to  Ford — looked  him  over. 

"Know  anything  about  steam  engines?"  he 
asked  him.  Ford  said  he  did. 

"Well,  the  engine  at  sub-station  A  quit  this 
morning.  I  got  a  couple  of  mechanics  working 


BACK  TO  DETROIT  67 

on  it,  but  they  don't  seem  to  be  doing  much.  Get 
out  there  and  see  what  you  can  do,  and  let  me 
know/' 

"All  right,  sir,"  Ford  replied,  and  went.  It 
was  then  about  ten  in  the  morning.  Gilbert,  busy 
with  the  troubles  in  the  main  plant,  heard  no  more 
from  sub-station  A  until  6  o'clock  that  evening. 
Then  a  small  boy  arrived  with  a  message :  "En 
gine  running  O.  K. — 'Ford." 

Gilbert  went  out  to  the  sub-station.  The  en 
gine,  in  perfect  order,  was  roaring  in  the  base 
ment.  On  the  first  floor  the  dynamos  were  going 
at  full  speed.  His  worries  with  sub-station  A 
were  over.  He  went  down  to  the  engine  and 
found  Ford  busy  with  an  oil  can. 

"Want  the  job  of  night  engineer  here?"  Gil 
bert  asked  him.  "Pays  forty-five  a  month." 

"Go  to  work  right  now  if  you  say  so,"  Ford 
assured  him. 

"All  right.  I'll  have  another  man  here  to  re 
lieve  you  at  six  in  the  morning.  Come  down  to 
the  office  some  time  to-morrow  and  I'll  put  your 
name  on  the  payroll." 

In  one  day  Ford  had  got  the  very  opportunity 
he  wanted — a  job  where  he  could  study  electricity 
at  first  hand. 

An  hour  later  Mrs.  Ford,  who  had  spent  the 
day  drearily  unpacking  trunks  and  putting  the 
telescope  bags  under  the  bed  in  a  hopeless  attempt 
to  make  a  boarding-house  bedroom  homelike,  re 
ceived  an  enthusiastic  note. 


68       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

"Got  fine  job  already.  Working  all  night.  Go 
to  bed  and  don't  worry.  Everything  is  settled 
splendidly. — Henry." 

He  had  forgotten  to  mention  that  his  wages 
were  forty-five  dollars  a  month. 


CHAPTER  XII 

LEARNING  ABOUT  ELECTRICITY 

FORTY-FIVE  dollars  a  month  and  a  twelve-hour- 
a-day  job — for  these  Henry  Ford  had  traded  his 
big,  pleasant  home,  with  its  assured  comfort  and 
plenty,  and  his  place  as  one  of  the  most  prosper 
ous  and  respected  men  in  Greenfield.  The  change 
would  have  been  a  calamity  to  most  men. 

Henry  Ford  was  happy.  The  new  job  gave 
him  a  chance  to  work  with  machinery,  an  oppor 
tunity  to  learn  all  about  electricity.  His  content 
ment,  as  he  went  whistling  about  his  work  after 
Gilbert  left,  would  have  seemed  pure  insanity  to 
the  average  person.  Forty-five  dollars  a  month ! 

"You  see,  I  never  did  bother  much  about 
money,"  he  says.  "My  wages  were  enough  for 
food  and  shelter,  and  that  was  all  I  wanted. 
Money  matters  always  seemed  to  sort  of  take  care 
of  themselves,  some  way.  It's  always  that  way. 
If  a  man  is  working  at  something  he  likes,  he's 
bound  to  work  hard  at  it,  and  then  the  money 
comes.  Worrying  about  money  is  about  the 
worst  thing  a  man  can  do — it  takes  his  mind  off 
his  work." 

His  philosophy  apparently  justified  itself. 

In  the  months  that  followed  sub-station  A  had 
69 


70       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

no  more  breakdowns.  Now  and  then  Manager 
Gilbert  inquired  how  the  new  man  was  getting 
along.  "A  wizard  at  machinery — had  some 
trouble  with  the  dynamo  last  night,  and  he  had 
it  fixed  in  no  time,"  he  heard.  Or,  "Say,  where'd 
you  get  him?  He  knows  more  about  this  plant 
than  the  man  that  built  it." 

Ford  himself  was  not  in  evidence.  The  man 
ager,  quitting  work  at  about  the  time  Ford  ar 
rived  at  the  sub-station  for  the  night  shift,  did 
not  see  him  again  until  one  day  at  the  end  of 
three  months  the  engine  at  the  main  plant 
stopped.  The  engineer  in  charge  looked  at  it 
and  shook  his  head. 

"Can't  do  anything  with  it  till  to-morrow,"  he 
said.  "We'll  have  to  take  it  down."  It  was  late 
in  the  afternoon,  and  the  engine  was  needed  to 
keep  Detroit  lighted  that  night.  Gilbert,  remem 
bering  the  reports  of  the  new  man,  sent  for  Ford. 
He  came  and  fixed  the  engine. 

It  was  all  in  the  day's  work,  as  far  as  he  was 
concerned.  He  went  back  to  sub-station  A  and 
forgot  the  incident.  He  does  not  remember  it 
now.  Gilbert  remembered  it,  but  he  did  not  go 
out  of  his  way  to  pay  any  attention  to  Ford.  He 
simply  forgot  about  the  mechanical  work  of  sub 
station  A.  He  knew  Ford  would  take  care  of  it. 
A  manager  spends  his  time  and  thought  on  the 
poor  workmen ;  a  good  man  he  leaves  alone. 

When  Ford  had  been  with  the  Edison  Com 
pany  six  months,  drawing  his  forty-five  dollars 


LEARNING  ABOUT  ELECTRICITY    71 

regularly  and  handing  it  to  Mrs.  Ford  to  pay  the 
landlady,  he  knew  the  Edison  plants  from  the 
basements  up.  He  had  become  enthusiastic  over 
electrical  problems.  In  his  idle  time,  after  his 
twelve  hours'  work  at  the  sub-station,  he  was 
planning  the  batteries  and  spark-plugs  for  his 
gasoline  engine. 

About  that  time  a  shift  in  the  force  left  vacant 
the  place  of  manager  of  the  mechanical  depart 
ment.  Gilbert  sent  for  Ford. 

"Think  you  can  handle  the  job?"  he  asked 
him. 

"Yes,  I  can  handle  it,"  Ford  said.  Gilbert  gave 
him  the  job.  When  he  drew  his  pay  at  the  end 
of  the  month  he  found  he  was  getting  $150. 

"Now,"  he  said  to  himself,  "I've  got  to  have 
a  place  of  my  own,  where  I  can  work  on  my 
gasoline  engine  at  night." 

"Now  we  can  have  a  home  of  our  own,  and 
get  away  from  this  awful  boarding-house,"  Mrs. 
Ford  exclaimed,  when  he  told  her  the  news,  and 
he,  contrasting  the  supper  he  had  just  eaten  with 
memories  of  her  excellent  cooking,  heartily 
agreed.  Besides,  it  seemed  to  him  that  paying 
rent  was  wasting  money.  He  proposed  to  buy  a 
lot  and  build  on  it. 

They  talked  it  over,  walking  up  and  down  De 
troit's  wide,  tree-shaded  streets  in  the  evening. 
Next  morning  early  Mrs.  Ford  put  on  her  hat 
and  went  down  to  the  real  estate  offices.  Before 
night  two  hustling  young  city-lot  salesmen  had 


72       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

interviewed  Ford  at  the  Edison  plant,  and  when 
he  came  home  that  night  another  one  was  waiting 
on  the  boarding-house  steps. 

That  week  was  a  busy  one.  Ford  worked 
from  six  in  the  morning  to  six  at  night  in  the 
Edison  plant,  hurried  home  to  find  Mrs.  Ford 
waiting,  bright-eyed  with  eagerness  to  tell  him  of 
the  lots  she  had  seen  that  day,  and  before  he  had 
finished  his  supper  he  was  snatched  away  from  it 
to  hear  an  enthusiastic  salesman  describe  still 
other  bargains  in  Detroit  real  estate. 

Impatient  to  be  at  work  on  his  drawings  for 
the  gasoline  engine,  he  was  taken  from  end  to 
end  of  the  city  to  inspect  homesites.  He  was  ex 
periencing  that  agony  of  all  workers,  being 
obliged  to  spend  so  much  time  preparing  a  place 
to  work  that  there  was  none  left  for  the  work. 

"This  thing  has  to  stop,"  he  said  in  despera 
tion  to  his  wife  one  evening.  "I've  been  inquir 
ing  around  a  little,  and  I  think  the  best  place  to 
buy  is  out  on  Edison  avenue.  Put  on  your  hat 
and  we'll  go  out  and  decide  on  one  of  those  lots 
we  saw  last  Saturday." 

They  went  out  and  looked  them  over.  On  one 
of  the  lots  was  an  old  shed.  Ford  examined  it. 

"If  this  place  suits  you,  we'll  take  it,"  he  said. 
"This  shed  will  make  a  shop  without  much  fix 
ing.  I'll  build  the  gasoline  engine  here." 

Mrs.  Ford  looked  about  at  the  scattered  little 
houses  and  bare  lots.  It  was  spring;  the  grass 
was  beginning  to  sprout,  and  the  smell  of  the 


LEARNING  ABOUT  ELECTRICITY    73 

damp  earth  and  the  feeling  of  space  reminded 
her  of  the  country.  She  liked  it. 

"All  right,  let's  buy  this  one/'  she  said. 

A  few  days  later  they  signed  the  contract.  The 
lot  cost  seven  hundred  dollars,  fifty  dollars  down 
and  the  rest  in  monthly  payments.  Ford  drew 
from  the  savings  bank  two  hundred  dollars,  his 
bank  balance  at  the  time  he  left  the  farm,  and 
bought  lumber.  After  that  he  spent  his  evenings 
building  the  house. 

While  he  hammered  and  sawed  Mrs.  Ford  was 
at  work  in  the  yard.  She  set  out  rose  bushes, 
planted  a  vegetable  garden  behind  the  shed.  The 
neighboring  women  came  over  to  get  acquainted, 
and  asked  her  to  come  in  some  time  and  bring  her 
sewing  as  soon  as  she  got  settled.  After  those 
six  months  in  a  dreary  boarding  house  it  must 
have  been  pleasant  to  her  to  see  the  beginnings 
of  a  home  and  a  friendly  circle  again. 

"This  seems  to  be  a  nice  neighborhood ;  I  think 
we're  going  to  enjoy  it  here,"  she  said  later  to 
her  husband,  holding  the  lantern  while  he  nailed 
down  the  floors,  long  after  dark. 

"That's  good — glad  you  like  it,"  he  answered. 
"I  wish  the  place  was  finished,  so  I  could  get  to 
work." 

Meantime,  at  the  Edison  plant,  he  was  making 
his  first  experiments  in  applying  his  machine-idea 
to  the  managing  of  men. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

EIGHT  HOURS,  BUT  NOT  FOR  HIMSELF 

WHEN  Henry  Ford  became  manager  of  the 
mechanical  department  the  workmen  in  the  Edi 
son  plants  were  working  twelve-hour  shifts  as  a 
matter  of  course.  In  those  days  the  theory  of 
practically  all  employers  was  that  men,  like  the 
rest  of  their  equipment,  should  be  worked  to  the 
limit  of  their  strength. 

"We  had  about  forty  men  on  the  regular  list 
and  four  or  five  substitutes  who  were  kept  busy 
filling  in  for  the  regular  men  who  were  sick  or 
tired  out,"  he  said.  "I  hadn't  been  in  charge  long 
before  it  struck  me  there  was  something  wrong. 
If  our  machines  had  broken  down  as  often  as 
our  men  did  anybody  would  have  known  we 
weren't  handling  them  right. 

"No  good  engineer  will  run  a  machine  at  the 
limit  of  its  power  and  speed  for  very  long.  It 
hurts  the  machine.  It  isn't  sentimentalism  to 
take  care  of  the  machine;  it's  plain  common  sense 
and  efficiency.  It  isn't  sentimentalism  to  look  out 
for  the  interests  of  the  men. 

"The  sooner  people  get  over  the  idea  that 
there's  a  difference  between  ideals  of  brotherhood 
and  practical  common  sense  the  sooner  we'll  do 

74 


EIGHT  HOURS  75 

away  with  waste  and  friction  of  all  kinds  and 
have  a  world  that's  run  right.  The  only  trouble 
now  is  that  people  haven't  the  courage  to  put  their 
ideals  to  work.  They  say,  'Oh,  of  course,  the 
oretically  we  believe  in  them — but  they  aren't 
practical !'  What's  the  use  of  believing  in  anything 
that  isn't  practical?  If  it's  any  good  at  all  it's 
practical.  The  whole  progress  of  the  world  has 
been  made  by  men  who  went  to  work  and  used 
their  impractical  theories. 

"Well,  I  figured  over  the  situation  quite  a  while 
and  I  found  out  that  by  putting  the  substitutes  on 
the  regular  list  and  shifting  the  men  around  a 
little  I  could  give  them  all  an  eight-hour  day 
without  increasing  the  pay  roll.  I  did  it. 

"Yes,  there  was  a  howl  from  the  stockholders 
when  they  heard  about  it.  Nobody  had  ever  tried 
it  before ;  they  thought  I  was  going  to  turn  every 
thing  upside  down  and  ruin  the  business.  But 
the  work  was  going  along  better  than  before. 
The  men  felt  more  like  work,  and  they  pitched  in 
to  show  they  appreciated  being  treated  right.  We 
had  fewer  breakdowns  after  that;  everything 
went  better. 

"After  the  thing  was  done  it  was  easy  enough 
to  prove  that  it  paid,  and  the  stockholders  quieted 
down  after  one  or  two  complaints. 

"As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  don't  believe  in  any 
hours  for  work.  A  man  ought  to  work  as  long 
as  he  wants  to,  and  he  ought  to  enjoy  his  work 
so  much  that  he  wants  to  work  as  long  as  he  can. 


76       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

It's  only  monotonous,  grinding  work  that  needs 
an  eight-hour  day.  When  a  man  is  creating  some 
thing,  working  to  get  results,  twelve  or  fourteen 
hours  a  day  doesn't  hurt  him." 

Ford  put  this  theory  into  practice  as  apparently 
he  had  done  with  all  his  theories.  He  himself 
worked  more  than  fourteen  hours  a  day. 

From  6  to  6  he  worked  in  the  Edison  plant, 
for  his  eight-hour  regime  did  not  apply  to  him 
self.  Then  he  hastened  home  to  the  little  house 
on  Edison  avenue,  ate  supper  and  hurried  out  to 
his  improvised  workshop  in  the  old  shed.  He 
turned  on  the  big  electric  lights  and  there  in  the 
glare  lay  materials  for  his  self-propelling  gasoline 
engine — his  real  work,  which  at  last  he  could  be 
gin! 

Until  late  at  night  the  neighbors  heard  the 
sound  of  his  tools  and  saw  the  glare  of  light 
through  the  cracks. 

"The  Smiths  are  giving  a  'party  to-night — I 
suppose  we  can't  go?"  Mrs.  Ford  said  one  even 
ing,  wistfully.  "Oh,  well— when  the  gasoline  en 
gine  is  finished — how  long  do  you  think  it's  going 
to  take?" 

"I  don't  know — I'm  working  on  the  cylinder 
now.  I'll  have  to  have  a  larger  bore  to  get  the 
speed — and  then  there'll  be  the  transmission." 
Ford  stopped  speaking  and  was  lost  in  the  prob 
lems.  He  finished  supper  abstractedly  and  pushed 
back  his  chair. 

"Oh,  about  the  party.     Too  bad.     I  hope  you 


EIGHT  HOURS  77 

don't  mind  much.  When  I  get  the  gasoline  en 
gine  finished,"  he  said  apologetically,  and  hurried 
out  to  work  on  it.  In  a  few  minutes  he  was  ab 
sorbed  with  the  cylinder. 

He  had  found  that  day  a  piece  of  pipe,  thrown 
into  the,  scrap  heap  at  the  Edison  plant,  and  it 
had  struck  him  at  once  that  it  would  do  for  his 
cylinder,  and  that  using  it  would  save  him  the 
time  and  work  of  making  one.  He  brought  it 
home,  cut  it  to  the  right  length  and  set  it  in  the 
first  Ford  engine. 

Meantime,  in  the  house  Mrs.  Ford  cleared 
away  the  supper  dishes,  took  out  her  sewing  and 
settled  down  with  a  sigh.  The  neighbors  were 
going  by  to  the  Smiths'  party.  She  could  hear 
them  laughing  and  calling  to  each  other  on  the 
sidewalk  outside.  In  the  shed  her  husband  was 
filing  something ;  the  rasp  of  the  file  on  the  metal 
sounded  plainly. 

After  all,  she  thought,  she  might  as  well  give 
up  the  idea  of  parties.  She  couldn't  give  one  her 
self ;  she  knew  Henry  would  refuse  to  leave  his 
hateful  engine  even  for  one  evening.  She  was 
very  homesick  for  Greenfield. 

The  months  went  by.  Ford  worked  all  day 
at  the  Edison  plant,  half  the  night  in  his  own 
shop.  The  men  he  met  in  his  work  had  taken  to 
looking  at  him  half  in  amusement,  half  in  good- 
humored  contempt.  He  was  a  "crank,"  they  said. 
Some  of  the  younger  ones  would  laugh  and  tap 
their  foreheads  when  he  had  gone  past  them. 


78       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

One  night  he  came  home  and  found  Mrs.  Ford 
crying.  The  neighbors  were  saying  that  he  was 
crazy,  she  sobbed.  She'd  told  Mrs.  Lessing  just 
exactly  what  she  thought  of  her,  too,  and  she'd 
never  speak  to  her  again!  But,  oh,  wouldn't  he 
ever  get  that  horrid  engine  finished  so  they  could 
live  like  other  people  ? 

It  all  hurt.  No  man  was  ever  friendlier,  or 
enjoyed  more  the  feeling  of  comradeship  with 
other  men  than  Ford.  But  it  was  a  choice  be 
tween  that  and  his  automobile.  He  went  on  with 
his  routine  of  work,  fourteen  or  sixteen  hours  of 
it  every  day,  and  he  drew  more  into  himself,  be 
came  more  reserved  with  every  month  that 
passed. 

If  any  man  ever  followed  Emerson's  doctrine 
of  self-reliance,  giving  up  friends  and  family  in 
his  devotion  to  his  own  work,  that  man  was 
Henry  Ford  in  those  days. 

There  was  nothing  dramatic  about  it — just  an 
obscure  machinist  with  an  idea,  willing  to  give 
up  social  pleasures,  restful  domestic  evenings,  the 
good  opinion  of  his  neighbors,  and  work  hard  in 
an  old  shed  behind  his  common  little  house.  Only 
an  ordinary  man  turning  his  back  on  everything 
most  of  us  want,  for  an  "impractical"  theory. 
That  was  all. 

He  continued  to  work  for  two  years.  He  built 
the  engine  slowly,  thinking  out  every  step  in  ad 
vance,  drawing  every  casting  before  he  made  it, 
struggling  for  months  over  the  problem  of  the 


EIGHT  HOURS  79 

electrical  wiring  and  spark.  Sometimes  he 
worked  all  night. 

"Sick?  No,  I  never  was  sick,"  he  says.  "It 
isn't  overworking  that  breaks  men  down;  it's 
overplaying  and  overeating.  I  never  ate  too 
much,  and  I  felt  all  right,  no  matter  how  long  I 
worked.  Of  course,  sometimes  I  was  pretty 
tired." 

One  day  he  called  his  wife  out  to  the  shed. 
The  little  engine,  set  up  on  blocks,  was  humming 
away,  its  flywheel  a  blur  in  the  air.  The  high 
speed  revolutions  that  made  the  automobile  pos 
sible  were  an  accomplished  fact. 

"Oh,  Henry!  It's  done!  You've  finished  it!" 
she  said  happily. 

"No,  that's  just  the  beginning.  Now  I've  got 
to  figure  out  the  transmission,  the  steering  gear 
and  a — a  lot  of  things,"  he  replied. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

STRUGGLING  WITH  THE  FIRST  CAR 

FORD  was  now  a  man  of  nearly  30,  an  insig 
nificant,  unimportant  unit  in  the  business  world 
of  Detroit,  merely  one  of  the  subordinate  man 
agers  in  the  Edison  plant.  Seeing  him  on  his 
way  home  from  work,  a  slender,  stooping,  poorly 
dressed  man,  the  firm  set  of  his  lips  hidden  by 
the  sandy  mustache  he  wore  then,  and  his  blue 
eyes  already  surrounded  by  a  network  of  tired 
wrinkles,  men  probably  looked  at  him  half -pity 
ingly,  and  said :  "There's  a  man  who  will  never 
get  anywhere." 

He  had  his  farm,  unprofitable  since  he  had  left 
it,  a  small  home  partly  paid  for,  and  the  little  gas 
engine,  to  show  for  fourteen  years  of  hard  work. 

Probably  he  received  more  than  one  letter  from 
his  father  and  brothers  in  Greenfield,  urging  him 
to  come  back  to  the  farm,  where  he  and  his  wife 
might  live  comfortably  among  their  old  friends, 
and  he  need  not  work  so  hard.  It  would  have 
seemed  a  wise  move. 

But  writh  the  completion  of  the  little  one-cylin 
der,  high-speed  engine,  Ford  was  more  than  ever 
possessed  by  his  idea.  He  brought  one  or  two  of 
the  men  from  the  Edison  shop  to  see  it.  They 

80 


STRUGGLING  WITH  THE  FIRST  CAR    81 

watched  it  whirring  away  on  its  pedestal  of 
blocks,  they  examined  its  large  cylinder,  its  short- 
stroke  piston,  noted  its  power,  and  looked  at  Ford 
with  some  increased  respect.  But  most  of  them 
were  nevertheless  doubtful  of  the  success  of  the 
automobile.  The  idea  of  a  horseless  carriage  in 
general  use  still  seemed  to  them  fantastic. 

"Well,  looks  like  you  could  make  it  go,"  they 
conceded.  "But  it's  going  to  be  pretty  expensive 
to  run.  Not  many  people'll  want  to  buy  it.  And 
where  will  you  get  the  capital  to  manufacture  it?** 

"I'm  making  it  cheap.  I'm  going  to  make  it 
cheap  enough  so  every  man  in  this  country  can 
have  one  before  I'm  through/'  Ford  said. 

Already  his  belief  that  "a  thing  isn't  any 
good  unless  it's  good  for  everybody"  was  taking 
form.  He  did  not  intend  to  make  a  few  high- 
priced  toys  for  wealthy  men ;  he  planned  to  make 
something  useful  for  thousands  of  men  like  him 
self,  who  were  wasting  money  in  keeping  idle 
horses,  as  he  had  done  on  the  farm.  He  still 
meant  to  make  a  farm  tractor,  as  soon  as  he  had 
worked  out  the  principle  of  a  self-propelling  ma 
chine. 

As  to  the  capital,  he  believed  that  question  would 
take  care  of  itself  when  the  time  came.  His  job 
was  to  make  the  machine,  and  he  did  not  waste 
time  telling  himself  that  there  was  no  chance  for 
a  poor  man. 

The  problem  of  transmitting  the  power  of  the 
engine  to  the  wheels  now  engrossed  his  attention. 


82       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

He  brought  home  materials  for  a  light  buggy 
frame  and  built  it.  Four  old  bicycle  wheels  were 
repaired,  fitted  with  heavy  rims  and  large  pneu 
matic  tires,  and  placed  on  the  axles.  The  ques 
tion  then  was  how  to  attach  the  engine. 

To  us,  familiar  with  automobiles,  it  seems  sim 
ple  enough,  but  when  Ford  stood  in  the  old  shed, 
looking  at  the  'buggy  frame  and  then  at  the  little 
engine,  he  was' attempting  a  feat  that  had  never 
been  accomplished. 

Always  before,  carriages  had  been  pulled. 
Naturally  enough  his  first  thought  was  to  apply 
the  power  of  the  engine  to  the  front  wheels. 
Then  how  sho\ild  he  steer?  What  mechanism 
should  he  use,  powerful  enough  to  turn  the  hind 
wheels,  against  the  pull  of  the  engine,  and  flexible 
enough  to  respond  quickly  and  make  a  sharp 
turn? 

Then  there  was  the  problem  of  the  throttle, 
and  the  gears.  The  machine  must  be  able  to  go 
more  slowly,  or  to  pick  up  speed  again,  without 
shutting  off  the  power.  The  driver  must  be  able, 
when  necessary,  to  throw  off  the  power  entirely, 
and  to  apply  it  quickly  again,  without  stopping 
the  engine. 

All  these  vexing  questions,  and  many  minor 
ones,  were  to  be  solved,  and  always  there  was  the 
big  question  of  simplicity.  The  machine  must  be 
cheap. 

"I'm  building  this  thing  so  it  will  be  useful/' 
Ford  said  once  while  he  was  in  the  thick  of  his 


STRUGGLING  WITH  THE  FIRST  CAR    83 

perplexities.  "There  isn't  any  object  in  working 
at  it  unless  it  will  be  useful,  and  it  won't  be  use 
ful  unless  it's  cheap  enough  so  common  people 
can  have  it,  and  do  their  work  with  it." 

The  essential  democracy  of  the  man  spoke 
then.  It  is  the  distinctly  American  viewpoint  of 
the  man  who  for  years  had  fought  sun  and  wind 
and  weather,  tearing  his  food  and  shelter  from 
the  stubborn  grasp  of  the  soil,  and  who  now 
struggles  with  mechanical  obstacles,  determined 
in  spite  of  them  to  make  something  for  practical 
use.  His  standards  of  value  were  not  beauty  or 
ease  of  luxury.  He  wanted  to  make  a  machine 
that  would  do  the  greatest  possible  quantity  of 
good,  hard  work. 

His  third  winter  in  the  house  on  Edison  ave 
nue  arrived,  and  still  the  automobile  was  not 
completed.  When  he  went  out  to  work  in  the  old 
shed  after  supper  he  lighted  a  fire  in  the  rusty 
heating  stove,  set  up  in  a  corner,  and  often  Mrs. 
Ford  came  out  and  sat  on  a  box,  watching  while 
he  fitted  parts  together  or  tried  different  trans 
mission  devices. 

He  had  settled  finally  on  a  leather  belt,  pass 
ing  over  the  flywheel  and  connecting  with  the 
rear  axle.  A  pulley  arrangement,  controlled  by 
a  lever,  tightened  or  loosened  this  belt,  thus  in 
creasing  or  decreasing  the  speed  of  the  automo 
bile.  That  broad  strip  of  leather,  inclosed,  run 
ning  from  the  engine  on  the  rear  axle  to  the 


84       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

pulley  under  the  front  seat,  was  the  parent  of 
the  planetary  system  of  transmission. 

Ford  worked  on  it  all  winter.  It  was  a  lonely 
time  for  Mrs.  Ford,  for  the  general  attitude  of 
the  neighborhood  toward  her  husband  had  roused 
her  good  country  temper,  and  she  "refused  to 
have  anything  to  do  with  people  who  talked  like 
that."  She  knew  Henry  was  perfectly  sane,  a 
better  husband  than  most  of  them  had,  too,  and 
anyhow  it  was  none  of  their  business  how  Henry 
spent  his  time,  and  if  they  didn't  like,  they  could 
lump  it. 

Nevertheless,  as  the  winter  days  followed  each 
other  in  an  apparently  endless  procession,  she 
grew  moody.  The  baby  was  coming,  and  she  was 
homesick  for  Greenfield  and  the  big,  comfortable 
country  home,  with  friends  running  in  and  out, 
and  the  sound  of  sleighbells  jingling  past  on  the 
road  outside. 

She  put  the  little  house  to  rights  in  the  morn 
ing,  and  faced  a  long,  lonely  day.  She  sewed  a 
while,  wandered  about  the  rooms,  looking  out  on 
the  dreary  little  street,  with  its  scattered  houses 
and  dirty  trampled  snow,  yawned,  and  counted 
the  hours  till  her  husband  would  come  home  for 
supper. 

When  he  came,  she  had  the  house  warm  and 
bright,  the  table  set,  hot  biscuits  browning  in 
the  oven.  She  dished  up  the  food,  poured  the 
tea,  brought  the  hot  plates.  They  sat  down  to 
eat  and  talk,  and  the  minutes  seemed  to  fly.  Be- 


STRUGGLING  WITH  THE  FIRST  CAR    85 

fore  she  had  said  half  she  had  stored  up  through 
the  day,  before  Henry  had  more  than  begun  to 
talk,  he  pushed  back  his  plate,  drank  his  tea,  and 
said :  "Well,  I  must  be  getting  to  work."  Then 
he  went  out  to  the  shed  and  forgot  her  in  the  ab 
sorbing  interest  of  the  automobile. 

"Oh,  when  is  it  going  to  be  finished!"  she  said 
one  night,  after  she  had  been  sitting  for  a  long 
time  in  silence,  watching  him  at  work  on  it.  She 
began  the  sentence  cheerfully,  but  she  caught  her 
breath  at  the  end  and  began  to  cry.  "I  c-can't 
help  it,  I'm  sorry.  I  w-want  to  go  home  to  Green 
field!"  she  said. 

Ford  was  testing  the  steering  gear.  He 
dropped  his  tools  in  surprise,  and  went  over  to 
comfort  her. 

"There,  there!"  he  said,  I  suppose  patting  her 
back  clumsily,  in  the  awkward  way  of  a  man  un 
accustomed  to  quieting  a  sobbing  woman.  "It's 
done  now.  It's  practically  done  now.  It  just 
needs  a  little  more " 

She  interrupted  him.  She  said  his  horrid  old 
engine  was  always  "just  needing  a  little  more." 
She  said  she  wanted  him  to  take  her  back  to 
Greenfield.  Wouldn't  he  please,  just  for  a  little 
while,  take  her  home  to  Greenfield? 


CHAPTER  XV 

A  RIDE  IN  THE  RAIN 

TEARS,  almost  hysterics,  from  the  woman  who 
for  seven  years  had  been  the  quiet,  cheerful  little 
wife,  humming  to  herself  while  she  did  the  house 
work — it  was  more  than  startling,  it  was  terrify 
ing. 

Ford  realized  then,  probably  for  the  first  time, 
how  much  the  making  of  the  automobile  had  cost 
her. 

He  quieted  her  as  well  as  he  could,  and  prom 
ised  that  he  would  take  her  back  to  Greenfield. 
He  would  give  up  his  job  at  the  Edison  plant  and 
move  to  the  farm  to  live,  since  she  cared  so  much 
about  it,  he  said.  His  work  on  the  machine  could 
wait. 

He  took  her  into  the  house  and  made  her  a  cup 
of  hot  tea.  When  she  was  sitting  comfortably 
warming  her  feet  at  the  heating  stove  and  sip 
ping  the  tea,  he  said  he  would  just  run  out  and 
fasten  the  shed  door  for  the  night. 

The  machine  was  almost  finished.  A  few  more 
screws,  a  tightening  of  the  leather  belt,  the 
placing  of  the  steering  lever,  and  it  would  be  com 
plete.  He  had  spent  four  years  of  hard  work, 
and  harder  thought,  on  its  building — delayed  first 

86 


A  RIDE  IN  THE  RAIN  87 

by  his  poverty,  then  by  the  building  of  the  house, 
and  always  held  back  for  twelve  hours  out  of 
every  day  by  his  work  at  the  Edison  plant.  Now 
he  would  have  to  pi  t  it  aside  again,  to  spend 
precious  days  and  weeks  disposing  of  his  equity 
in  the  house,  moving,  settling  in  Greenfield,  strug 
gling  with  new  hired  men,  beginning  again  the 
grind  of  managing  a  farm. 

It  was  only  another  delay,  he  said  doggedly  to 
himself;  he  would  make  the  machine  run  yet.  In 
the  meantime  he  could  not  resist  taking  up  his 
tools  and  working  on  it,  just  a  minute  or  so. 

The  engine  was  in  place,  the  gears  adjusted. 
He  tightened  the  leather  belt  and  tested  the  pul 
ley  again.  Then  he  set  the  rear  axle  on  blocks 
of  wood,  lifting  the  wheels  from  the  ground  and 
started  the  engine.  The  cough  of  the  cylinder 
quickened  into  a  staccato  bark,  the  flywheel 
blurred  with  speed.  Then  Ford  tightened  the 
pulley,  the  broad  leather  belt  took  hold.  The  rear 
wheels  spun. 

She  was  running! 

It  remained  only  to  test  the  machine  in  actual 
going  on  the  ground.  Ford  went  to  work  on  the 
steering  gear.  He  had  thought  it  all  out  before, 
he  had  made  all  the  parts.  Now  he  must  put 
them  together,  fit  them  into  place  and  test  them. 

He  forgot  about  his  wife,  waiting  in  the  house; 
he  did  not  notice  that  the  fire  in  the  stove  was 
getting  low  and  the  hour  was  growing  late.  He 


88       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

bent  every  thought  and  energy  to  placing  the 
steering  gear. 

At  midnight  he  was  still  working.  At  i  o'clock 
he  had  the  front  wheels  blocked  up  and  was  test 
ing  the  steering  lever.  It  needed  some  changes. 
At  2  o'clock  they  were  finished.  He  started  the 
engine  again  and  it  missed  fire.  Something  was 
wrong  with  the  spark. 

At  3  o'clock,  grimy,  hollow-cheeked,  absorbed, 
he  was  hard  at  work  when  he  felt  a  hand  on  his 
arm  and  heard  his  wife  say,  "Henry!" 

"My  dear,  what's  the  matter?  I'm  coming  in 
right  away.  Why,  you're  all  wet!"  he  exclaimed, 
seeing  her  dripping  shawl. 

"It's  raining  hard.  Didn't  you  know  it?"  she 
said. 

"You  shouldn't  have  come  out;  I  thought  you 
were  going  right  to  bed,"  he  answered. 

"Well,  I  couldn't  sleep  very  well.  I  got  to 
thinking — Henry,  we  mustn't  go  back  to  the 
farm.  It  was  just  a  notion  of  mine.  I  guess  I 
was  tired,  or  something.  I've  changed  my  mind. 
We'd  better  stay  right  here  till  you  get  the  ma 
chine  finished." 

He  laughed. 

"Well,  little  woman,  I  guess  that  won't  be  so 
very  long.  It's  finished  right  now,"  he  said. 
"You  wait  a  minute  and  you'll  see  me  running  it." 

She  stood  and  watched,  more  excited  than  he, 
while  he  started  the  engine  again,  nailed  a  couple 
of  old  boards  together  for  a  seat  and  opened  wide 


A  RIDE  IN  THE  RAIN  89 

the  shed  doers.  The  rain  was  falling  in  torrents 
and  underfoot  the  light  snow  had  turned  to  thin 
slush  on  the  frozen  ground.  It  was  very  dark. 

He  pushed  the  machine  into  the  yard  and  hung 
a  lantern  over  the  dashboard  for  a  headlight.  In 
side  the  shed  Mrs.  Ford,  in  a  voice  shaking  with 
excitement,  begged  him  to  wait  until  morning, 
but  he  did  not  listen.  The  engine  and  steering 
gear  were  protected  from  the  rain  and  no  discom 
fort  could  have  equaled  for  him  the  disappoint 
ment  of  another  delay. 

The  time  had  come  when  he  could  prove  his 
theories.  He  would  not  waste  one  minute  of  it. 

The  engine  was  already  running.  He  stepped 
into  the  car,  sat  down,  and  slowly,  carefully, 
tightened  the  pulley. 

Then,  in  the  first  Ford  automobile,  he  rode 
away  from  the  old  shed. 

When  he  felt  the  machine  moving  under  him 
he  tightened  his  grasp  on  the  steering  lever.  Sud 
denly  the  light  of  the  lantern  showed  him  a  dozen 
things  he  had  never  noticed  in  the  yard  before. 
The  clothes-pole  loomed  menacingly  before  him, 
a  pile  of  flower  pots  seemed  to  grow  out  of  all 
proportion  to  its  ordinary  size. 

The  machine  wobbled  unsteadily,  while  he  des 
perately  struggled  to  drive  it  in  a  straight  line. 
He  turned  it  from  the  flower  pots,  jerked  it  back 
in  time  to  avoid  running  into  the  fence,  and 
headed  straight  for  the  clothes-pole.  It  seemed 
to  jump  at  him. 


90       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

At  the  last  minute  he  thought  of  the  pulley. 
He  loosened  the  leather  belt,  the  engine  spun 
wildly,  the  car  stopped.  Henry  Ford  got  out, 
breathing  hard,  and  pushed  the  machine  around 
the  clothes-pole. 

"You  see,  I  not  only  had  to  make  the  machine, 
but  I  had  to  get  into  it  and  learn  how  to  steer 
it  while  it  was  running,"  he  says.  It  occurred 
to  him  that  he  would  like  a  good  wide  space  for 
the  job. 

After  he  had  rescued  the  machine  from  the 
clothes-pole  he  turned  it  toward  the  street. 
Chug-chugging  away,  he  passed  the  house,  drove 
over  the  gravel  sidewalk,  and  turned  down  Edi 
son  avenue.  The  scattered  houses  wTere  dark  and 
silent;  every  one  was  asleep. 

The  little  machine,  rattling  and  coughing,  pro 
ceeded  through  the  thin  slush  in  jerks  and  jumps, 
doing  valiantly  with  its  one  cylinder.  Perched 
on  the  rough  board  seat,  Henry  Ford  battled  with 
the  steering  lever,  while  on  the  sidewalk  Mrs. 
Ford,  wrapped  in  her  shawl,  anxiously  kept  pace 
with  them.  It  was  not  difficult  to  do,  for  the  car 
was  not  breaking  any  future  speed  limits. 

At  the  end  of  the  first  block  Ford  turned  the 
car  successfully,  and  rode  down  the  side  street, 
zig-zagging  widely  from  side  to  side  in  his  effort 
to  drive  straight  ahead.  Fortunately,  Detroit's 
streets  are  wide. 

When  he  had  passed  the  second  block  he  be 
gan  to  wonder  how  to  turn  and  drive  back.  At 


A  RIDE  IN  THE  RAIN  91 

the  end  of  the  third  block  he  solved  the  difficulty. 
He  stopped  the  car,  jumped  out,  lifted  it  around, 
and  headed  it  for  home. 

By  this  time  the  engine  was  missing  again,  but 
it  continued  gallantly  to  jerk  and  push  the  light 
car  forward  until  Ford  had  reached  his  own 
yard.  Then  he  stopped  it,  pushed  the  machine 
into  the  shed,  and  turned  to  Mrs.  Ford. 

"Well,  it  runs  all  right.  Guess  I'll  have  some 
breakfast  and  go  to  bed,"  he  said,  and  Mrs.  Ford 
hurried  in  to  make  coffee. 

"How  did  I  feel?  Why,  I  felt  tired,"  he  ex 
plains  now.  "I  went  to  bed  and  slept  all  next 
day.  I  knew  my  real  work  with  the  car  had  just 
begun.  I  had  to  get  capital  somehow,  start  a  fac 
tory,  get  people  interested — everything.  Besides, 
I  saw  a  chance  for  a  lot  of  improvements  in  that 


car." 


CHAPTER  XVI 

ENTER  COFFEE  JIM 

PROBABLY  the  disposition  to  rest  on  our  lau 
rels  is  more  than  anything  else  responsible  for  the 
mediocrity  of  the  individual  and  the  slow 
progress  of  the  race.  Having  accomplished 
something,  most  of  us  spend  some  time  in  ad 
miring  it  and  ourselves.  It  is  characteristic  of 
big  men  that  past  achievements  do  not  hold  their 
interest;  they  are  concerned  only  with  their  ef 
forts  to  accomplish  still  more  in  the  future. 

Henry  Ford  had  built  an  automobile.  His  four 
years*  work  had  been  successful,  and  that  little 
machine,  scarcely  larger  than  a  bicycle,  with  its 
pulley-clutch,  puffing  little  one-cylinder  engine, 
and  crude  steering  apparatus,  stood  for  an  epoch 
in  human  progress. 

He  might  be  pardoned  if  he  had  spent  a  month 
or  two  in  self -congratulation,  in  driving  the  car 
up  and  down  Detroit's  streets  and  enjoying  the 
comments  of  the  men  who  had  laughed  at  him 
so  long. 

But  apparently  it  did  not  occur  to  him.  He 
saw  already  a  number  of  possible  improvements 
in  the  little  machine.  He  was  as  indifferent  to 

92 


ENTER  COFFEE  JIM  93 

the  praise  of  other  men  as  he  had  been  to  their 
ridicule. 

After  that  one  day  of  rest  he  resumed  almost 
the  old  routine.  When  a  few  men  at  the  Edison 
plant  laughingly  inquired  how  he  was  getting 
along  with  the  great  invention  he  remarked 
quietly  that  the  machine  was  running;  he  had 
been  riding  in  it  already.  Then  at  6  o'clock  he 
hurried  home  and  out  to  the  shed  for  the  usual 
evening's  work.  He  was  trying  to  plan  an  en 
gine  which  would  give  more  power;  incidentally 
in  his  odd  moments  he  was  working  to  improve 
the  steering  apparatus. 

One  imagines  the  incredulity,  the  amazement, 
that  followed  his  quiet  statement  that  the  thing 
was  actually  running.  The  men  at  the  plant  be 
gan  to  drop  around  at  the  Ford  place  to  look  at 
it.  They  came  doubtfully,  prepared  either  to 
laugh  or  to  be  convinced.  After  they  had  exam 
ined  the  engine  and  looked  over  the  transmission 
and  steering  gear  they  went  away  still  hesitating 
between  two  conclusions. 

"It  works,  all  right,"  they  said.  "There's  no 
question  the  blamed  thing  runs.  How  do  you 
suppose  he  ever  happened  to  stumble  onto  the 
idea  ?  But  where's  he  going  to  get  the  capital  to 
manufacture  it?  After  all,  there  won't  be  much 
of  a  market — a  few  rich  fellows'll  buy  it,  proba 
bly,  for  the  novelty.  After  all,  you  can't  make  a 
machine  that  will  do  the  work  of  horses  to  any 
great  extent." 


94       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Some  of  them  took  a  different  view.  They 
became  enthusiastic. 

"My  Lord,  Ford,  there's  millions  in  this  thing. 
Millions !"  they  said.  "You  ought  to  get  out  and 
organize  a  company — a  big  company.  Incor 
porate  and  sell  stock  and  make  a  clean-up  right 
away.  And  then  build  a  machine  like  a  phaeton, 
with  big  leather  cushions  and  carriage  lamps  and 
a  lot  of  enamel  finish — why,  there  are  hundreds 
of  men  that  could  afford  to  pay  two  or  three 
thousand  dollars  for  one  of  'em.  You  could 
make  a  hundred  per  cent  profit — two  hundred 
per  cent." 

Ford  listened  to  all  of  them  and  said  little.  He 
was  busy  improving  the  machine;  it  did  not  suit 
him  yet ;  he  felt  he  could  make  it  much  more  pow 
erful  and  efficient  with  a  little  more  work.  Mean 
time  he  revolved  in  his  mind  plans  for  putting  it 
on  the  market.  Those  plans  included  always  one 
fundamental  point.  He  was  resolved  to  make  the 
automobile  cheap. 

"I've  got  a  machine  here  that  saves  time  and 
work  and  money,"  he  said.  "The  more  people 
who  have  it  the  more  it  will  save.  There's  no 
object  in  building  it  so  only  a  few  rich  men  can 
own  one.  It  isn't  the  rich  men  who  need  it;  it's 
the  common  folks  like  me." 

News  of  the  amazing  machine  to  be  seen  in 
the  old  shed  behind  the  little  house  on  Edison 
street  spread  rapidly.  About  this  time  news  dis 
patches  carried  word  of  two  other  automobiles 


ENTER  COFFEE  JIM  9$ 

built  in  this  country.  A  man  named  Duryea  of 
Springfield,  111.,  and  another  named  Haynes,  in 
Kokomo,  Ind.,  had  been  working  on  the  same 
idea.  A  reporter  found  Ford  at  work  on  his  en 
gine,  interviewed  him  and  wrote  a- story  for  a 
Detroit  paper. 

One  or  two  wealthy  men  hunted  Ford  up  and 
talked  about  furnishing  the  capital  to  manufac 
ture  the  machine.  They  saw,  as  some  of  Ford's 
friends  had  done,  an  opportunity  to  float  a  big, 
company,  sell  stock,  and  build  a  high-priced  car. 

Ford  considered  these  offers  for  a  time.  Build 
ing  an  automobile  had  been  only  half  of  his  idea; 
building  it  cheap  had  been  the  other  half,  and  he 
would  not  abandon  it. 

He  figured  it  out  in  dollars  and  cents;  two 
hundred  per  cent  on  a  small  quantity  of  cars,  or 
a  smaller  profit  on  a  larger  quantity.  He  showed 
that  the  most  sound  basis  for  the  company  was 
the  manufacture  of  a  large  number  of  machines, 
at  a  profit  sufficient  merely  to  keep  enlarging  the 
plant  and  building  more  machines.  The  idea  did 
not  appeal  to  the  men  who  were  eager  for  large 
immediate  profits  for  themselves. 

In  the  end  the  men  with  money  dropped  the 
matter.  Ford  was  obstinate,  but  he  was  a  small 
man  with  no  capital,  merely  a  crank  who  had  hit 
by  accident  on  a  good  idea;  he  would  come 
around  all  right  in  time,  they  concluded. 

Ford  continued  to  work  at  the  Edison  plant 
and  spend  his  evenings  trying  to  improve  his  ma- 


96       HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

chine.  He  had  taken  Mrs.  Ford  to  Greenfield, 
where  she  would  stay  with  her  mother  until  the 
baby  was  born.  After  that  one  hysterical  out 
burst  on  the  night  the  automobile  was  finished, 
she  had  returned  to  her  cheerful  acceptance  of  his 
interest  in  the  car.  Indeed,  she  herself  had  be 
come  enthusiastic  about  its  possibilities. 

"You  stay  right  here  and  keep  your  job  with 
the  Edison  people/'  she  said.  "I'll  be  perfectly 
all  right  with  mother,  and  maybe  by  the  time  I 
come  back  you'll  have  a  company  organized  and 
a  whole  factory  going,  who  knows  ?  Only,  mind 
you  don't  work  too  late  at  night,  and  promise 
you'll  eat  your  meals  regular." 

Ford  promised,  but  when  he  returned  to  the 
dark  little  house  at  night  and  faced  the  task  of 
building  a  fire  and  cooking  supper  for  himself 
it  seemed  to  him  a  bigger  job  than  building  the 
automobile  had  been.  He  heated  some  coffee  on 
the  gasoline  stove,  burned  some  bread  into  a 
semblance  of  toast,  and  scrambled  a  few  eggs. 
Then  he  spread  a  newspaper  on  the  kitchen  table, 
set  the  frying-pan  on  it,  and  managed  to  make  a 
meal. 

Naturally  about  midnight  he  grew  hungry.  He 
came  into  the  kitchen,  looked  at  the  cold,  greasy 
frying-pan,  still  setting  on  the  kitchen  table,  re 
membered  that  he  was  out  of  bread,  and  thought 
of  an  all-night  lunch  wagon  that  stood  near  sub 
station  A,  where  sometimes  he  bought  a  cup  of 
coffee  when  he  was  working  there. 


ENTER  COFFEE  JIM  97 

The  automobile  stood  waiting  in  the  shed;  he 
told  himself  that  he  wanted  to  test  the  steering 
gear  again,  anyway.  He  went  out,  started  the 
engine,  climbed  in  and  chug-chugged  away 
through  the  silent,  deserted  streets  to  the  lunch 
wagon. 

Coffee  Jim,  loafing  among  his  pans  and  mounds 
of  Hamburg  steak,  was  astonished  to  see  the 
queer  little  machine,  jerking  and  coughing  its 
way  toward  him.  He  remembered  Ford,  and 
while  he  sliced  the  onions  and  cut  the  bread  for 
Ford's  midnight  luncheon  they  talked  about  the 
automobile.  Afterward  Coffee  Jim  examined  it 
in  detail  and  marveled.  When  Ford  took  him  for 
a  little  ride  in  it  he  became  enthusiastic. 

Soon  it  was  part  of  Ford's  routine  to  drive  the 
little  car  to  the  lunch  wagon  at  midnight,  have  a 
cup  of  coffee  and  a  hot  sandwich  and  a  chat  with 
Coffee  Jim.  They  became  friends. 

It  was  one  of  those  accidental  relationships 
which  have  great  consequences.  A  hundred  thou 
sand  Ford  automobiles  to-day  owe  their  existence 
largely  to  that  chance  friendship  between  Ford 
and  Coffee  Jim. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

ANOTHER  EIGHT  YEARS 

IF  Ford  had  been  unduly  elated  over  his  suc 
cess  in  making  an  automobile  the  years  that  fol 
lowed  that  night  ride  in  the  rain  would  have  been 
one  succession  of  heart-breaking  disappoint 
ments. 

Men  with  money  enough  to  build  a  factory 
were  not  seeking  business  ventures  in  the  nine 
ties.  Money  was  scarce,  and  growing  more  so. 
The  few  financiers  who  might  have  taken  up 
Ford's  invention,  floated  a  big  issue  of  common 
stock,  and  sold  the  cars  at  a  profit  of  two  or  three 
hundred  per  cent,  saw  no  advantage  in  furnish 
ing  the  capital  to  start  a  small  plant  on  Ford's 
plan. 

He  himself  was  close  pressed  for  money.  Pay 
ments  on  the  little  house,  with  their  interest,  the 
cost  of  his  wife's  illness  and  of  providing  for 
the  new  baby,  his  own  living  expenses,  took  the 
greater  part  of  his  salary.  The  situation  would 
have  been  disheartening  to  most  men.  Ford  set 
his  teeth  and  kept  on  working. 

The  one-cylinder  engine  bothered  him.  It  did 
not  give  him  the  power  he  wanted.  -  After  he  had 
worked  with  it  for  a  time  he  took  it  down,  cut 

98 


ANOTHER  EIGHT  YEARS  99 

another  section  from  the  piece  of  pipe  and  made 
another  cylinder.  The  two-cylinder  result  was 
somewhat  better,  but  still  the  little  car  jerked 
along  over  the  ground  and  did  not  satisfy  him. 

He  fell  back  into  the  old  routine — twelve  hours 
at  the  Edison  plant,  home  to  supper  and  out  to 
the  shed  to  work  the  evening  through  on  the  ma 
chine.  Mrs.  Ford  was  in  charge  of  the  house 
again,  busy  keeping  it  neat  and  bright,  nursing 
the  baby,  making  his  little  dresses,  washing  and 
ironing,  keeping  down  the  grocer's  bills. 

Meantime  other  men,  with  machines  no  better 
than  Ford's,  wrere  starting  factories  and  manu 
facturing  automobiles.  Once  in  a  while  on  his 
way  home  from  work  Ford  saw  one  on  the  street 
— a  horseless  carriage,  shining  with  black  enamel, 
upholstered  with  deep  leather  cushions,  orna 
mented  with  elaborate  brass  carriage  lamps. 
Usually  they  were  driven  by  steam  engines. 

They  were  a  curiosity  in  Detroit's  streets,  a 
luxury  which  only  the  very  rich  might  afford. 

Crowds  gathered  to  look  at  them.  Ford  must 
have  seen  them  with  some  bitterness,  but  ap 
parently  he  was  not  greatly  discouraged. 

"I  didn't  worry  much.  I  knew  I  could  put  my 
idea  through  somehow,"  he  says.  "I  tell  you,  no 
matter  how  things  may  look,  any  project  that's 
founded  on  the  idea  of  the  greatest  good  for  the 
greatest  number  will  win  in  the  end.  It's  bound 
to." 

He  went  home,  ate  the  supper  Mrs.  Ford  had 


ioo     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

waiting  and  doggedly  resumed  work  in  the  old 
shed. 

The  chronicle  of  those  years  from  the  stand 
point  of  an  onlooker  would  be  merely  a  weari 
some  record  of  the  machine  shop — a  detailed  rec 
ord  of  pistons,  number  of  revolutions  per  min 
ute,  experiments  in  spark-timing.  Only  the 
knowledge  of  their  result,  or  Ford's  own  story 
of  his  hopes,  disappointments,  mental  struggles, 
would  make  them  interesting.  That  part  of  his 
story  Ford  will  not  dwell  upon. 

"I  kept  on  working  another  eight  years,"  he 
says  quietly.  Eight  years! 

Some  time  during  them  he  saw  what  was 
needed.  Heretofore  the  crank  shaft  had  made 
Q)  complete  revolution  on  a  single  power  impulse. 
Ford  perceived  that  two  impulses,  properly 
placed,  would  increase  both  the  power  and  the 
smoothness  of  the  running. 

The  result  of  that  quiet  eight  years'  work  was 
the  first  practical  two-cylinder  opposed  engine 
mounted  on  a  motor  car.  In  the  little  shed,  work 
ing  alone  through  the  long  evenings,  while  his 
neighbors  rested  and  visited  on  their  front 
porches,  and  his  wife  sang  the  baby  to  sleep  in 
the  house,  he  built  the  four-cycle  engine  that  made 
the  gasoline  automobile  a  possibility. 

In  the  spring  of  1901  he  finished  it,  mounted 
it  on  the  old  car  which  he  had  made  nine  years 
before  of  discarded  bicycle  wheels  and  rough 
boards,  and  drove  it  out  of  the  shed.  It  was 


ANOTHER  EIGHT  :Y2'A#S%:   \ioi 


nearly  midnight  of  a  quiet  star-lit  spring  night. 
The  lights  in  near-by  houses  had  gone  out  long 
before;  in  his  own  home  Mrs.  Ford  and  the  boy 
were  sleeping  soundly.  Ford  turned  the  car  down 
Edison  avenue  and  put  on  full  power. 

The  engine  responded  beautifully.  The  car 
raced  down  the  avenue,  under  the  branches  of 
the  trees  whose  buds  were  swelling  with  spring 
sap,  while  the  wind  lifted  Ford's  hair  and  blew 
hard  against  his  face.  It  was  pleasant,  after  the 
long  hours  in  the  shed.  The  steady  throb  of  the 
motor,  the  car's  even  progress,  were  delightful. 

"By  George!  I'll  just  ride  down  and  show 
this  to  Coffee  Jim,"  said  Ford. 

His  circle  of  acquaintances  in  Detroit  was 
small;  his  long  hours  of  work  prevented  his  cul 
tivating  them.  At  the  Edison  plant  his  pleasant 
but  rather  retiring  manner  had  won  only  a  casual 
friendliness  from  the  men.  This  friendliness  that 
had  grown  since  his  success  with  the  motor  had 
replaced  their  derision  with  respect,  but  still  it 
was  far  from  intimate  companionship. 

He  knew  no  one  with  money.  He  was  still  a 
poor  man,  working  for  wages,  with  only  his 
brain  and  hands  for  equipment.  Nearly  thirteen 
years  of  hard  work  had  produced  his  motor  car, 
but  he  had  very  little  money  and  no  financial  back 
ing  for  its  manufacture.  His  closest  friend  was 
Coffee  Jim. 

Coffee  Jim  examined  the  car  with  interest  that 
night.  He  left  his  lunch  wagon  and  took  a  short 


i92     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

ride  in  it.  He  listened  while  Ford  explained  its 
mechanical  principle. 

"You've  got  a  winner  there,  all  right,"  he  said 
heartily.  "All  you  need  is  capital."  Ford  agreed 
with  him.  He  had  been  revolving  in  his  mind 
plans  for  getting  it;  when  he  left  Coffee  Jim  at 
his  lunch  wagon  and  rode  slowly  home  he  con 
tinued  to  think  about  it.  That  morning  he  drove 
to  the  Edison  plant  in  the  car,  and  on  his  way 
home  at  night  he  made  a  detour  through  Detroit's 
principal  streets. 

He  wanted  people  to  talk  about  the  car,  and 
they  did.  Every  one  in  Detroit  heard  more  or 
less  about  it  in  the  months  that  followed.  Mean 
time  Ford  took  a  few  days'  leave  from  the  Edi 
son  plant  now  and  then  and  personally  made  ef 
forts  to  interest  financiers  in  its  manufacture. 
He  interviewed  his  banker  and  most  of  the  big 
business  men  of  the  city,  outlined  his  plan  for  a 
factory,  demonstrated  the  car.  Every  one  showed 
some  interest,  but  Ford  did  not  get  the  money. 

Late  that  fall  he  discussed  the  situation  with 
Coffee  Jim  one  night. 

"I've  got  the  car  and  I've  got  the  right  idea," 
he  said.  "It's  bound  to  win  in  time.  The  trouble 
is  these  men  can't  get  an  idea  until  they  see  it 
worked  out  with  their  own  eyes.  What  I  need 
is  some  spectacular  exhibition  of  the  car.  If  I 
could  enter  her  in  the  races  next  year  she'd  stand 
a  chance  to  win  over  anything  there'll  be  in  the 


ANOTHER  EIGHT  YEARS         103 

field — then  these  men  would  fall  over  themselves 
to  back  me." 

"Well,  can't  you  do  it?"  Coffee  Jim  inquired. 
Ford  shook  his  head. 

"Cost  too  much,"  he  said.  "I've  laid  off  work 
a  lot  this  summer,  trying  to  get  capital,  and  the 
boy's  been  sick.  I'd  have  to  buy  a  new  car  for 
the  racing.  I  might  rake  up  money  enough  for 
material,  but  I  couldn't  make  the  car  in  time, 
working  evenings,  and  I  can't  afford  to  give  up 
my  job  and  spend  my  whole  time  on  it." 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

WINNING  A  RACE 

COFFEE  JIM  pondered  the  situation.  He  knew 
Ford  thoroughly ;  he  believed  in  the  car.  To  win 
the  Grosse  Point  races  would  give  Ford  his 
chance — a  chance  he  was  missing  for  lack  of 
money.  Coffee  Jim  thought  of  his  own  bank  ac 
count,  which  had  been  growing  for  years,  nickel 
by  nickel,  dime  by  dime,  from  the  profits  on  fried- 
ham  sandwiches  and  hamburger  and  onions. 

"See  here,  Ford,"  he  said  suddenly :  "I'll  take 
a  chance.  I'll  back  you.  You  go  on,  quit  your 
job,  build  that  car  and  race  her.  I'll  put  up  the 
money." 

Ford  accepted  the  offer  without  hesitation.  He 
believed  in  the  car.  Coffee  Jim  waved  aside  Ford's 
suggestion  of  securing  the  loan  by  his  personal 
note,  or  by  a  mortgage  on  the  little  house. 

"Take  the  money ;  that's  all  right.  Pay  it  back 
when  you  can.  Your  word's  good  enough  for 
me/'  he  said.  He  believed  in  Ford. 

It  was  a  demonstration  of  the  practical  value 
of  friendship — a  pure  sentiment  which  had  come 
unexpectedly  to  the  rescue  when  all  material 
means  had  failed. 

Hard  work,  real  ability,  business  sagacity,  had 
104 


WINNING  A  RACE  105 

been  unable  to  give  Ford  the  start  which  his 
friendship  with  the  owner  of  the  little  lunch 
wagon  had  brought  him.  It  was  one  of  those  ex 
periences  which  helped  to  form  Ford's  business 
philosophy,  that  philosophy  which  sounds  so  im 
practical  and  has  proved  so  successful. 

"Any  man  who  considers  everything  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  most  good  to  the  most  people 
will  never  want  for  anything,"  he  says.  "No,  I 
don't  mean  mental  influence,  or  psychic  attrac 
tion,  or  anything  like  that.  I  mean  plain  common 
sense.  That's  the  attitude  that  makes  friends — 
all  kinds  of  friends,  everywhere,  some  that  you 
never  even  hear  about — and  friends  bring  all  the 
rest." 

He  took  Coffee  Jim's  money,  gave  up  his  job 
at  the  Edison  plant,  and  went  to  work  on  the  little 
racer. 

"It  seemed  pretty  good  to  be  able  to  work  all 
day  on  the  car,  as  well  as  the  evenings,"  he  says. 

He  took  down  the  engine  and  entirely  rebuilt 
it,  substituting  the  best  of  material  for  the  make 
shifts  he  had  been  obliged  to  use.  He  spent  long 
hours  designing  a  racing  body,  figuring  out  prob 
lems  of  air-resistance  and  weight. 

Eight  months  of  careful  thought  and  work 
went  into  that  car.  At  last,  in  the  early  summer 
of  1902,  it  was  finished.  At  4  o'clock  one  morn 
ing,  business  being  over  at  the  lunch  wagon,  he 
and  Coffee  Jim  took  it  out  for  a  trial. 

It  ran  like  the  wind.     Down  the  quiet,  vacant 


io6     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

streets  of  Detroit,  in  the  gray  chill  of  early  morn 
ing,  they  raced  at  a  speed  that  made  the  houses 
on  either  side  blur  into  a  gray  haze.  Coffee  Jim 
clung  breathlessly  to  the  mechanic's  seat,  while 
Ford  bent  over  the  steering  lever  and  gave  her 
more  power,  and  still  more  power. 

"Holy  Moses,  she  sure  does  run!"  Coffee  Jim 
gasped,  when  the  car  slowed  down  smoothly  and 
stopped.  "You'll  win  that  race  sure  as  shoot 
ing." 

"Yes,  she's  a  good  little  car,"  Ford  said,  look 
ing  it  over  critically.  "She's  a  pretty  good  little 
car."  He  stood  looking  at  it,  his  hands  in  his 
pockets. 

"I've  got  an  idea  for  a  four-cylinder  motor 
that  will  beat  her,  though,"  he  said.  "It's  too 
late  to  build  it  now ;  we'll  have  to  put  this  one  in 
the  race.  But  I'll  make  a  car  yet  that'll  beat  this 
as  much  as  this  beats  a  bicycle." 

It  was  not  a  boast;  it  was  a  simple  statement 
of  fact.  The  little  racer  was  finished,  thor 
oughly  well  done;  he  spent  no  more  thought  on 
it.  Already  his  mind  was  reaching  ahead,  plan 
ning  a  better  one. 

It  may  be  imagined  with  what  anxiety  the 
Fords  awaited  the  day  of  the  races.  Ford  was 
to  be  his  own  driver,  and  Mrs.  Ford's  dread  of 
losing  the  race  was  mixed  with  fear  for  his  safety 
if  there  should  be  an  accident.  She  had  seen  the 
car  in  the  tryout,  and  its  speed  terrified  her, 
though  Ford  assured  her,  with  masculine  clumsi- 


WINNING  A  RACE  107 

ness,  that  even  greater  speed  had  been  made  in 
previous  races.  Alexander  Winton  of  Cleveland, 
then  the  track  champion  of  the  country,  had 
beaten  it  more  than  once.  On  the  racetrack,  Ford 
said,  he  was  confident  he  could  do  better.  Later 
there  was  a  quiet  tryout  on  the  racetrack  that 
showed  Ford  he  was  right,  though  he  kept  secret 
the  exact  time  he  had  made. 

On  the  day  of  the  races  enormous  crowds 
gathered  at  the  Grosse  Point  tracks.  It  was  the 
first  automobile  track  meeting  ever  held  in  Mich 
igan,  and  excitement  ran  high.  Alexander  Win- 
ton  was  there,  confident  and  smiling  in  his  car, 
which  had  broken  so  many  records.  The  crowds 
cheered  him  wildly. 

Ford,  quiet  and  perhaps  a  little  white  with  the 
tension,  drove  his  car  out  on  the  tracks,  was 
greeted  with  a  few  uncertain  cheers. 

"Who's  that?"  people  said. 

"Oh,  that's  a  Detroit  man — let's  see,  what  is 
his  name?  Ford — never  heard  of  him  before. 
Funny  little  car,  isn't  it?" 

"Maybe  he's  been  put  in  to  fill  out.  He's  the 
only  man  against  Winton  in  the  free-for-all. 
They  couldn't  get  a  real  car  to  race  Winton." 

"Hi,  there's  Cooper!  Cooper!  Rah!"  The 
crowd  got  to  its  feet  and  cheered  Tom  Cooper, 
the  bicycle  champion,  who  strolled  on  to  the  field 
and  chatted  with  Winton. 

Ford  was  outside  it  all.  He  had  been  too  busy 
working  on  his  car,  had  had  too  little  money,  to 


io8     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

be  on  intimate  terms  with  the  big  men  of  the 
automobile  business,  or  to  become  friendly  with 
champions. 

One  supposes  he  wasted  no  regrets  on  the  situ 
ation.  He  had  his  car,  the  concrete  form  of  his 
mechanical  ideas.  The  time  had  come  to  test 
their  value.  If  they  were  right  he  would  win  the 
race;  if  they  were  wrong  he  would  go  back  to 
his  shed  and  work  out  better  ones.  He  examined 
the  car  again,  looked  to  the  gasoline  and  oil,  and 
was  ready. 

Coffee  Jim,  slapping  him  on  the  shoulder,  said, 
"All  right,  Ford,  go  to  it !"  and  hurried  up  to  his 
seat  in  the  grandstand,  where  Mrs.  Ford  and  the 
boy  were  already  sitting,  tense  with  excitement 
and  apprehension. 

Winton  waved  his  cap  in  a  last  response  to  the 
roar  from  the  crowd,  pulled  it  down  tight  and 
settled  back  into  his  seat.  The  signal  came.  Ford, 
bending  over  his  steering  lever,  threw  on  the 
power  and  felt  the  car  jump  forward.  The  race 
was  on. 

It  happened  thirteen  years  ago,  but  there  are 
still  people  in  Detroit  who  talk  of  that  race.  They 
describe  the  start,  the  enthusiasm  for  Winton,  the 
surprise  of  the  crowd  when  the  little  car,  driven 
by  nobody  knew  whom,  hung  on  grimly  just  be 
hind  the  champion,  to  the  end  of  the  first  stretch, 
through  the  second  stretch,  well  on  to  the  third. 
Winton' s  car  shot  ahead  then.  The  crowd  cheered 
him  madly.  Then  the  roar  died  down  in  amaze- 


WINNING  A  RACE  109 

ment.  The  little  car,  with  a  burst  of  speed,  over 
took  the  champion,  and  the  two  cars  shot  past  the 
grandstand  side  by  side  and  sped  into  the  second 
lap. 

Into  the  silence  came  a  yell  from  Coffee  Jim: 
"Ford !  Yah,  Ford !  Go  it,  go  it,  go  it !  Ford !" 
The  crowd  went  crazy. 

No  one  knew  clearly  what  was  happening. 
"Ford!  Ford!  Winton!  He's  ahead!  Go  it, 
go  it!  Winton!  Come  on,  come  on!  Look  at 
'em!  Look  at  'em!  Ford!"  they  yelled. 

Then  the  two  cars  swept  into  the  final  stretch 
abreast ;  the  crowd,  wild  with  excitement,  hoarse, 
disheveled,  was  standing  on  the  seats,  roaring, 
"Come  on,  come  on,  come  on !  Ford !  Ford !" 

Every  detail  of  that  race  must  still  be  distinct 
in  Ford's  mind,  but  he  sums  them  all  in  one  con 
cise  sentence : 

"It  was  SOME  race.    I  won  it." 


CHAPTER  XIX 

RAISING  CAPITAL 

FORD  sat  in  his  little  car,  white,  shaken,  dusty— 
the  track  champion  of  this  country. 

He  was  surrounded  by  a  small  crowd  of  auto 
mobile  enthusiasts,  promoters,  bicycle  champions, 
all  eager  to  meet  and  talk  with  the  unknown  man 
who  had  taken  the  honors  away  from  Winton. 
Among  them  was  Tom  Cooper.  Grasping  Ford's 
hand,  he  looked  with  interest  at  the  slightly  built, 
thin-cheeked  man  who  had  won  the  race,  and 
said :  "Bully  work,  the  way  you  handled  her  on 
that  last  turn.  Whose  car  is  it?" 

"Mine,"  said  Ford. 

"I  mean" — Cooper  looked  at  the  lines  of  the 
car — "I  mean,  whose  engine  did  you  use?" 

"It's  my  engine — I  made  it,"  Ford  replied. 

"The  deuce  you  did!"  Cooper  exclaimed. 
"Well,  I  must  say  you  did  a  good  job.  I'd  like 
to  look  it  over  some  time." 

"Sure ;  come  out  to  my  house  any  time.  Glad 
to  show  it  to  you,"  said  Ford  cordially. 

It  was  the  beginning  of  an  association  which 
was  to  be  highly  profitable  to  both  of  them. 

Other  men  of  national  prominence  in  the  world 
of  sports  greeted  Ford  enthusiastically  as  one  of 

no 


RAISING  CAPITAL  in 

themselves,  while  the  crowd  in  the  grandstand 
still  cheered  spasmodically.  Reporters  hurried  up 
with  camera  men,  and  Ford  stepped  back  into  the 
little  car  and  posed  somewhat  sheepishly  for  his 
first  newspaper  pictures.  Men  who  had  formerly 
passed  him  on  the  street  with  a  careless  nod,  now 
stopped  him,  clapped  him  on  the  shoulder  and 
talked  like  old  friends. 

He  was  beyond  question  the  hero  of  the  day. 
He  took  it  all  in  a  matter-of-fact  manner;  his  car 
had  done  no  more  than  he  had  expected  all  along, 
and  it  was  the  car,  not  himself,  which  filled  his 
mind.  He  hoped  that  the  publicity  would  bring 
him  the  necessary  capital  to  start  his  factory. 

Within  a  week  he  received  offers  from  wealthy 
men  of  Detroit.  The  local  papers  had  printed 
pictures  of  Ford,  his  car  and  the  old  shed  where 
it  had  been  built,  with  long  accounts  of  his  years 
of  work  and  his  efforts  to  organize  a  company. 
Detroit  had  been  awakened  to  the  fact  that  there 
was  a  real  opportunity  for  men  with  vision  and 
sufficient  capital  to  carry  it  out.  But  without  ex 
ception  these  men  insisted  on  one  thing — absolute 
control  of  the  company  to  be  organized. 

From  their  standpoint  that  proviso  was  rea 
sonable  enough.  If  they  furnished  the  money 
and  Ford  merely  the  idea,  of  course  they  should 
keep  not  only  the  larger  share  of  the  profits,  but 
entire  control  of  the  venture  as  well.  Without 
their  money,  they  argued,  his  idea  was  valueless. 

On  the  other  hand,  in  spite  of  his  eight  years 


ii2     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

of  struggle  for  lack  of  capital,  Ford  still  main 
tained  that  the  idea  was  the  really  valuable  part 
of  the  combination.  He  insisted  on  controlling 
the  organization  which  was  to  manufacture  his 
cars. 

While  he  had  been  working  alone  in  the  little 
shed  at  night,  he  had  thought  out  his  plan  for  a 
factory,  mentally  picturing  its  methods,  its  or 
ganization,  the  handling  of  material  from  the  raw 
iron  to  the  finished  cars,  fully  assembled,  rolling 
away  in  an  endless  line.  He  had  figured  costs  to 
the  fraction  of  a  cent;  planned  methods  of  ar 
ranging  the  work,  standardizing  the  product, 
eliminating  waste  and  friction  at  every  possible 
point. 

Now  that  the  car  was  finished,  the  factory  plan 
took  its  place  in  his  mind.  He  did  not  intend  to 
abandon  it  until  he  had  made  it  a  reality.  He 
was  going  to  build  that  factory,  as  he  had  built 
his  engine,  in  spite  of  any  obstacles  or  opposition. 
To  do  it,  he  must  control  the  company's  policies. 

It  was  a  deadlock.  To  the  man  with  money  it 
seemed  sheer  insanity  to  put  control  of  a  busi 
ness  venture  into  the  hands  of  an  obstinate  me 
chanic  who  had  happened  to  hit  on  an  idea  for 
an  automobile  engine.  Ford  would  not  dispose 
of  his  patents  on  any  other  condition.  In  a  short 
time  the  discussions  were  dropped,  and  he  was 
where  he  had  been  before  the  track  meeting. 

That  spectacular  race,  however,  had  brought 
him  many  acquaintances,  and  many  of  them  de- 


RAISING  CAPITAL  113 

veloped  into  close  friends.  James  Couzens,  a 
small  hardware  merchant  of  Detroit,  was  one  of 
them,  and  C.  H.  Wills,  a  mechanical  draughts 
man,  was  another.  With  Tom  Cooper,  the  bi 
cycle  champion,  they  spent  many  evenings  in  the 
old  shed,  or  on  the  front  steps  of  the  Ford  house, 
discussing  projects  for  the  Ford  factory. 

Couzens,  who  had  a  talent  for  business  affairs, 
formed  a  plan  for  interesting  a  small  group  of 
other  merchants  like  himself  and  financing  Ford. 
He  brought  negotiations  to  a  certain  point  and 
found  himself  confronted  again  by  their  demand 
for  control  of  the  company. 

"We  must  do  something  that'll  show  them  that 
they've  got  to  have  you  on  your  own  terms — 
something  big — startling — to  stir  them  up,"  he 
reported. 

"How  about  winning  another  race?"  Cooper 
suggested.  "They're  pulling  one  off  in  Ohio  this 
fall." 

"No,  it  must  be  right  here,  so  I  can  take  my 
men  out  and  let  them  see  it,"  Couzens  objected. 
"It  takes  a  lot  to  jar  any  money  loose  from  those 
fellows." 

"I  could  enter  at  the  Grosse  Point  tracks  next 
spring,"  Ford  said.  "But  it  wouldn't  show  them 
any  more  than  they've  already  seen,  if  I  race  the 
same  car.  I  can't  afford  to  build  another  one." 

He  was  still  in  debt  to  Coffee  Jim  for  the  cost 
of  his  firs-:  racer.  Coffee  Jim,  professing  him 
self  satisfied  with  the  results  of  the  race — doubt- 


ii4     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

less  he  had  judiciously  placed  some  bets  on  it — 
had  left  Detroit  in  the  meantime,  but  Ford  nev 
ertheless  counted  the  loan  among  his  liabilities. 

"Think  you  can  beat  that  car?"  Cooper  in 
quired. 

"I  know  I  can,"  Ford  replied  quietly. 

"Then  you  go  to  it  and  build  her.  I'll  back 
the  scheme,"  Cooper  said. 

It  was  another  debt  on  Ford's  shoulders,  but 
he  accepted  it  and  immediately  began  to  work  on 
another  racer.  With  the  intention  of  startling 
Couzens's  group  of  sedate  business  men,  he 
obeyed  Cooper's  injunction  to  "build  her  big — the 
roof's  the  limit."  The  result  was  certainly 
startling. 

Four  enormous  cylinders  gave  that  engine 
eighty  horsepower.  When  it  was  finished  and 
Cooper  and  Ford  took  it  out  one  night  for  a  trial, 
people  started  from  their  sleep  for  blocks  about 
the  Ford  house.  The  noise  of  the  engine  could 
be  heard  miles.  Flames  flashed  from  the  motor. 
In  the  massive  framework  was  one  seat.  Cooper 
stood  thunderstruck  while  Ford  got  in  and 
grasped  the  tiller. 

"Good  Lord,  how  fast  do  you  figure  she'll  do?" 
he  asked. 

"Don't  know,"  Ford  replied.  He  put  on  the 
power,  there  was  a  mighty  roar,  a  burst  of  flame, 
and  Cooper  stood  alone  on  the  curb.  Far  down 
the  street  he  saw  the  car  thundering  away. 


RAISING  CAPITAL  115 

A  few  minutes  later  it  came  roaring  back  and 
stopped.  Ford  sat  in  it,  white. 

"How  far  did  you  go?"  Cooper  asked.  Ford 
told  him. 

"Do  you  mean  to  say  she  makes  a  speed  like 
that?"  Cooper  ejaculated,  aghast. 

"She'll  make  better  than  that.  I  didn't  dare 
to  give  her  full  power,"  Ford  replied.  He  climbed 
out  and  stood  beside  Cooper,  and  the  two  looked 
at  the  car  in  awe. 

"See  here,  I  hope  you  don't  think  I'll  drive  that 
thing  in  the  races,"  Cooper  said  after  a  time.  "I 
wouldn't  do  it  for  a  gold  mine.  You'll  have  to 
do  it." 

"I  should  say  not!"  Ford  retorted.  "I  won't 
take  the  responsibility  of  driving  her  at  full  speed 
to  win  every  race  that  was  ever  run.  Cooper,  if 
that  car  ever  gets  really  started  it  will  kill  some 
body,  sure." 


CHAPTER  XX 

CLINGING  TO  A  PRINCIPLE 

FORD  and  Cooper  regarded  the  juggernaut  car 
for  some  time  in  meditative  silence. 

"Well,  I  guess  you've  built  a  real  racer  there, 
all  right/'  Cooper  said  admiringly. 

"Yes,  it  looks  as  if  I  had,"  Ford  answered. 
"The  question  is,  what  good  is  it?  Is  there  a 
man  on  earth  who'd  try  to  drive  it?" 

"Well,  I've  got  some  nerve  myself,  and  I  don't 
want  to,"  Cooper  admitted.  He  walked  around 
the  car  and  then  looked  again  at  the  engine. 
"How  fast  would  the  darn  thing  go,  I  wonder?" 
he  said. 

"Get  in  and  try  her,"  Ford  suggested.  Cooper 
climbed  in,  Ford  cranked  the  engine,  and  again 
sleeping  Detroit  jumped  from  its  bed.  The  car 
leaped  and  shot  dpwn  the  avenue. 

When  it  roared  back  again  Cooper  stopped  it 
in  the  middle  of  the  street. 

"That  settles  it  for  me,"  he  said.  "She  must 
have  made  forty  miles  an  hour,  and  she  wasn't 
half  running,  at  that.  I  won't  take  her  out  on 
the  track." 

They  confronted  the  situation  gloomily. 
Couzens  was  depending  on  the  success  of  the  car 

116 


CLINGING  TO  A  PRINCIPLE      117 

at  the  races  to  bring  his  men  in  line  for  the  or 
ganization  of  a  company ;  here  was  the  car,  built 
at  the  cost  of  months  of  work  and  some  hundreds 
of  Cooper's  money,  and  it  developed  such  speed 
that  it  was  not  safe  to  enter  it  for  the  race. 

Suddenly  Cooper  had  an  idea. 

"See  here!  I  know  a  man — if  there's  a  man 
on  earth  who  would  take  that  car  out  he's  the 
one !"  he  said.  "He  isn't  afraid  of  anything  un 
der  the  shining  sun — a  bicycle  rider  I  raced 
against  in  Denver.  Oldfield's  his  name — Barney 
Oldfield." 

"Never  heard  of  him,"  said  Ford.  "But  if 
you  think  he  would  drive  this  car  let's  get  hold 
of  him.  Where  is  he?" 

"He  ought  to  be  in  Salt  Lake  now,"  Cooper 
answered.  "I'll  wire  him." 

The  message  went  to  Oldfield  that  night. 
Couzens  was  told  of  the  situation,  and  the  three 
men  waited  anxiously  for  a  telegram  from  Salt 
Lake.  It  came  late  the  next  day,  asking  some 
further  questions  about  the  car  and  stating  that 
Oldfield  had  never  driven  an  automobile.  Cooper 
wired  again. 

The  track  meeting  was  to  be  held  the  next 
month.  Time  was  short.  Oldfield,  if  he  came, 
would  have  to  learn  every  detail  of  handling  the 
machine.  Even  with  an  experienced  man,  the 
danger  of  driving  that  car  in  the  races  was  great. 
Cooper  and  Ford  haunted  the  telegraph  offices. 

At  last  the  final  reply  came.     Oldfield  would 


n8     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

drive  the  car.  He  would  arrive  on  the  1st  of 
June,  exactly  one  week  before  the  date  of  the 
race. 

It  was  a  busy  week.  Ford  and  Cooper  bent 
every  energy  to  teaching  Oldfield  how  to  drive 
the  car.  They  crammed  his  mind  with  a  mass  of 
facts  about  the  motor,  the  factor  of  safety  in 
making  quick  turns,  the  way  to  handle  the  steer 
ing  lever.  On  the  day  before  the  races  he  took 
the  car  out  on  the  tracks  and  made  one  circuit 
safely,  holding  it  down  to  slow  speed. 

"I  can  handle  her  all  right.  I'll  let  her  out  to 
morrow,"  he  reported. 

The  day  of  the  track  meeting  dawned.  Ford 
and  Cooper,  tense  with  anxiety,  went  over  the  car 
thoroughly  and  coached  Oldfield  for  the  last  time. 
Couzens,  hiding  his  nervousness  under  a  bland, 
confident  manner,  gathered  his  group  of  business 
men  and  took  them  into  the  grandstand.  The 
free-for-all  was  called. 

Half  a  dozen  cars  were  entered.  When  they 
had  found  their  places  in  the  field  Barney  Old- 
field  settled  himself  in  his  seat,  firmly  grasped  the 
two-handed  tiller  which  steered  the  mighty  car, 
and  remarked,  "Well,  this  chariot  may  kill  me, 
but  they'll  say  afterward  that  I  was  going  some 
when  the  car  went  over  the  bank." 

Ford  cranked  the  engine,  and  the  race  was  on. 

Oldfield,  his  long  hair  snapping  in  the  wind, 
shot  from  the  midst  of  the  astounded  field  like 
a  bullet.  He  did  not  dare  look  around ;  he  merely 


CLINGING  TO  A  PRINCIPLE      119 

clung  to  the  tiller  and  gave  that  car  all  the  power 
it  had.  At  the  end  of  the  first  half  mile  he  was 
far  in  the  lead  and  gaining  fast. 

The  crowd,  astounded,  hysterical  with  excite 
ment,  saw  him  streak  past  the  grandstand  a  quar 
ter  of  a  mile  ahead  of  the  nearest  car  following. 
On  the  second  lap  he  still  gained.  Grasping  the 
tiller,  never  for  a  second  relaxing  that  terrific 
speed,  he  spun  around  the  course  again,  driving 
as  if  the  field  was  at  his  heels. 

He  roared  in  at  the  finish,  a  full  half  mile 
ahead  of  the  nearest  car,  in  a  three-mile  race. 

News  of  the  feat  went  around  the  world,  and 
in  one  day  Ford  was  hailed  as  a  mechanical 
genius. 

Couzens  brought  the  group  of  business  men 
down  to  the  track,  and  before  Oldfield  was  out  of 
the  car  they  had  made  an  appointment  to  meet 
Ford  next  day  and  form  a  company.  The  race 
had  convinced  them. 

"Some  people  can't  see  a  thing  unless  it  is  writ 
ten  in  letters  a  mile  high  and  then  illustrated  with 
a  diagram,"  Ford  says  meditatively. 

During  the  following  week  a  company  was 
formed,  and  Ford  was  made  vice-president,  gen 
eral  manager,  superintendent,  master  mechanic 
and  designer.  He  held  a  small  block  of  stock  and 
was  paid  a  salary  of  $150  a  month,  the  same 
amount  he  had  drawn  while  working  for  the  Edi 
son  company. 

He  was  satisfied.     The  salary  was  plenty  for 


120     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

his  needs;  apparently  he  waved  that  subject  aside 
as  of  little  importance.  At  last,  he  thought,  he 
had  an  opportunity  to  put  into  practice  his  plans 
for  manufacturing,  to  build  up  an  organization 
which  was  to  be  as  much  a  Ford  factor  as  his 
car  was  a  Ford  car. 

The  machine  idea  was  to  be  its  basis.  The  old 
idea  for  the  fifty-cent  watch  factory,  altered  and 
improved  by  years  of  consideration,  was  at  last 
to  be  carried  out.  He  planned  a  system  of 
smooth,  economical  efficiency,  producing  enor 
mous  numbers  of  cheap,  standardized  cars,  and  he 
began  work  on  it  with  all  the  enthusiasm  he  had 
felt  when  he  first  began  building  his  car. 

But  almost  immediately  there  was  friction  be 
tween  him  and  the  men  who  furnished  the  cap 
ital.  They  insisted  on  his  designing  not  cheaper 
cars,  but  more  luxurious  ones.  They  demanded 
that  his  saving  in  reduced  costs  of  production 
should  be  added  to  their  profits,  not  deducted 
from  the  price  of  the  car.  They  were  shrewd, 
successful  business  men,  and  they  intended  to  run 
their  factory  on  business  lines. 

"I  prefer  not  to  talk  about  that  year,"  Ford 
says  to-day.  "Those  men  were  right,  according 
to  their  lights.  I  suppose,  anyway,  some  of  them 
are  still  building  a  fairly  successful  car  in  the 
$3,000  to  $4,000  class,  and  I  don't  want  to  criti 
cize  other  men  in  the  automobile  field. 

"The  trouble  was  that  they  couldn't  see  things 
my  way.  They  could  not  understand  that  the 


CLINGING  TO  A  PRINCIPLE      121 

thing  that  is  best  for  the  greatest  number  of  peo 
ple  is  bound  to  win  in  the  end.  They  said  I  was 
impractical,  that  notions  like  that  would  hurt 
business.  They  said  ideals  were  all  very  well, 
but  they  wouldn't  work.  I  did  not  know  anything 
about  business,  they  said.  There  was  an  imme 
diate  profit  of  200  per  cent  in  selling  a  high-priced 
car;  why  take  the  risk  of  building  forty  cheap 
cars  at  5  per  cent  profit?  They  said  common 
people  would  not  buy  automobiles  anyway. 

"I  thought  the  more  people  who  had  a  good 
thing  the  better.  My  car  was  going  to  be  cheap, 
so  the  man  that  needed  it  most  could  afford  to 
buy  it.  I  kept  on  designing  cheaper  cars.  They 
objected.  Finally  it  came  to  a  point  where  I  had 
to  give  up  my  idea  or  get  out  of  the  company. 
Of  course  I  got  out" 

Over  thirty  years  old,  with  a  wife  and  child  to 
support,  and  no  capital,  Henry  Ford,  still  main 
taining  that  policy  of  "the  greatest  good  to  the 
greatest  number"  must  win  in  the  end,  left  the 
company  wnich  had  given  him  an  opportunity  to 
be  a  rich  man  and  announced  that  somehow  he 
would  manufacture  his  own  car  in  his  own  way. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

EARLY  MANUFACTURING  TRIALS 

AGAIN  Henry  Ford's  talent  for  friendliness 
helped  him.  Wills,  who  had  been  working  with 
Ford  as  a  draughtsman,  came  with  him  into  the 
new  company.  He  had  a  few  hundred  dollars, 
which  he  was  willing  to  stake  on  Ford's  ability. 
Couzens,  who  had  helped  organize  the  first  com 
pany,  came  also,  and  turned  his  business  talents 
to  the  task  of  raising  capital  to  start  the  new  con 
cern. 

While  he  was  struggling  with  the  problems  of 
organization,  Henry  Ford  rented  an  old  shack 
on  Mack  avenue,  moved  his  tools  from  the  old 
shed,  and,  with  a  couple  of  machinists  to  help 
him,  began  building  his  cheap  cars. 

News  of  his  venture  spread  in  Detroit.  The 
cars  sold  before  they  were  built.  Men  found  their 
way  to  the  crude  shop,  talked  to  Ford  in  his 
greasy  overalls,  and  paid  down  deposits  on  cars 
for  future  delivery.  Often  these  deposits  helped 
to  buy  material  for  the  same  cars  they  pur 
chased. 

Ford  was  working  on  a  narrow  margin.  Every 
dollar  which  could  be  squeezed  from  the  week's 

122 


EARLY  MANUFACTURING  TRIALS       123 

earnings  after  expenses  were  paid  went  directly 
into  more  material  for  more  cars.  At  first  his 
machinists  went  home  at  the  end  of  their  regular 
hours ;  then  Ford  worked  alone  far  into  the  night, 
building  engines.  Before  long  the  men  became 
vitally  interested  in  Ford's  success  and  returned 
after  supper  to  help  him. 

Meantime  a  few  men  had  been  found  who  were 
willing  to  buy  stock  in  the  new  company.  It  was 
capitalized  at  $100,000,  of  which  $15,000  was 
paid  in.  Then  Ford  set  to  work  in  earnest. 

The  force  was  increased  to  nearly  forty  men, 
and  Wills  became  manager  of  the  mechanical  de 
partment.  Carloads  of  material  were  ordered,  on 
sixty  days'  time,  every  pound  of  iron  or  inch  of 
wire  calculated  with  the  utmost  nicety  so  that 
each  shipment  would  be  sufficient  to  build  a  cer 
tain  number  of  completed  cars  without  the  waste 
of  ten  cents'  worth  of  material. 

Then  Ford  and  Couzens  set  out  to  sell  the  cars 
before  payment  for  the  material  came  due.  Ford 
set  a  price  of  $900  a  car,  an  amount  which  he 
figured  would  cover  the  cost  of  material,  wages 
and  overhead  and  leave  a  margin  for  buying  more 
material. 

*A  thousand  anxieties  now  filled  his  days  and 
nights.  Fifteen  thousand  dollars  was  very  little 
money  for  his  plant ;  wages  alone  would  eat  it  up 
in  ten  weeks.  The  raw  material  must  be  made 
into  cars,  sold,  and  the  money  collected,  before 
it  could  be  paid  for.  Many  times  a  check  from 


124     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

a  buyer  won  the  race  with  the  bill  from  the  foun 
dry  by  a  margin  of  hours.  Often  on  pay  day  Ford 
faced  the  prospect  of  being  unable  to  pay  the  men 
until  he  should  have  sold  a  shipment  of  cars  not 
yet  built. 

But  the  cars  sold.  Their  simplicity  of  con 
struction,  their  power,  above  all  their  cheapness, 
in  a  day  when  automobiles  almost  without  excep 
tion  sold  for  $2,500  to  $4,000,  brought  buyers. 
In  a  few  weeks  orders  came  from  Cleveland  for 
them;  shortly  afterward  a  dealer  in  Chicago 
wrote  for  an  agency  there. 

Still  the  success  of  the  venture  depended  from 
week  to  week  on  a  thousand  chances.  Ford,  with 
his  genius  for  factory  management,  reduced  the 
waste  of  material  or  labor  to  the  smallest  mini 
mum.  He  worked  on  new  designs  for  simpler, 
cheaper  motors.  He  figured  orders  for  material. 
His  own  living  expenses  were  cut  to  the  bone — 
every  cent  of  profit  on  sales  went  into  the  factory. 

Nearly  a  thousand  cars  were  sold  that  year,  but 
with  the  beginning  of  winter  sales  decreased,  al 
most  stopped.  The  factory  must  be  kept  run 
ning,  in  order  to  have  cars  for  the  spring  trade. 
Close  figuring  would  enable  them  to  keep  it  open, 
but  an  early,  brisk  market  would  be  necessary  to 
save  the  company  in  the  spring. 

In  this  emergency  Ford  recalled  the  great  ad 
vertising  value  of  racing.  He  had  designed  a 
four-cylinder  car  to  be  put  on  the  market  the  fol 
lowing  year.  If  he  could  make  a  spectacular 


EARLY  MANUFACTURING  TRIALS       125 

demonstration  of  four-cylinder  construction  as 
compared  with  the  old  motors,  the  success  of  his 
spring  sales  would  be  assured. 

Ford  announced  that  in  November  he  would 
try  for  the  world's  speed  record  in  a  four-cylinder 
car  of  his  own  construction. 

The  old  machine  in  which  Barney  Oldfield  had 
made  his  debut  as  an  automobile  driver  was 
brought  out  and  overhauled.  The  body  was  re 
built,  so  that  in  form  it  was  much  like  the  racing 
cars  of  to-day.  Ford  himself  remodeled  the  mo 
tor. 

The  test  was  to  be  made  on  the  frozen  surface 
of  Lake  St.  Clair.  The  course  was  surveyed.  On 
the  appointed  day,  with  Ford  himself  as  driver, 
the  motor  car  appeared  for  its  second  trial. 

A  stiff  wind  was  blowing  over  the  ice.  The 
surface  of  the  lake,  apparently  smooth,  was  in 
reality  seamed  with  slight  crevices  and  rough 
ened  with  frozen  snow.  Ford,  muffled  in  a  fur 
coat,  with  a  fur  cap  pulled  down  over  his  ears, 
went  over  it  anxiously,  noting  mentally  the  worst 
spots.  Then  he  cranked  the  car,  settled  himself 
in  the  seat  and  nodded  to  the  starter.  The  sig 
nal  came,  Ford  threw  on  the  power  and  was  off. 

The  car,  striking  the  ice  fissure,  leaped  into  the 
air,  two  wheels  at  a  time.  Ford,  clinging  to  the 
tiller,  was  almost  thrown  from  his  seat.  Zig 
zagging  wildly,  bouncing  like  a  ball,  the  machine 
shot  over  the  ice.  Twice  it  almost  upset,  but 
Ford,  struggling  to  keep  the  course,  never  shut 


126     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

down  the  power.  He  finished  the  mile  in  39  1-5 
seconds,  beating  the  world's  record  by  seven  sec 
onds. 

The  success  of  next  year's  sales  was  certain. 

The  following  day  when  Ford  reached  the  fac 
tory,  Wills  met  him  with  an  anxious  face.  It 
was  pay  day  and  there  was  no  money. 

"We  didn't  bother  you  about  it  last  week  be 
cause  you  were  so  busy  with  the  race,"  Wills  said. 
"We  thought  up  to  the  last  minute  that  the  check 
from  Chicago  would  come.  It  was  due  two  days 
ago.  We  wired  yesterday  and  got  no  answer. 
Mr.  Couzens  left  this  morning  on  the  early  train 
to  find  out  what  is  wrong.  You  know  how  it  is; 
the  men  want  their  money  for  over  Christmas. 
The Company  wants  men  and  they're  offer 
ing  more  money  than  we  can  pay.  I'm  afraid  our 
men  will  quit,  and  if  they  do  and  we  can't  get  out 
the  Cincinnati  order  next  week " 

Ford  knew  that  to  raise  more  money  from  the 
stockholders  would  be  impossible.  They  had  gone 
in  as  deeply  as  they  could.  To  sacrifice  a  block 
of  his  own  stock  would  be  to  lose  control  of  the 
company,  and  besides  it  would  be  difficult  to  sell 
it.  The  company  was  still  struggling  for  exist 
ence  ;  it  had  paid  no  dividends,  and  other  automo 
bile  manufacturers  were  already  paying  the  enor 
mous  profits  that  led  in  the  next  few  years  to 
wild,  disastrous  expansion  in  the  automobile  busi 
ness.  The  Ford  company  had  no  marketable  as- 


EARLY  MANUFACTURING  TRIALS       127 

sets — nothing  but  the  rented  building,  the  equip 
ment  and  a  few  unfilled  orders. 

"Well,  if  we  pull  through  the  men  will  have  to 
do  it,"  said  Ford.  "I'll  tell  them  about  it." 

That  evening  when  the  day's  work  was  over 
and  the  men  came  to  the  office  to  get  their  pay 
they  found  Ford  standing  in  the  doorway.  He 
said  he  had  something  to  tell  them.  When  they 
had  all  gathered  in  a  group — nearly  a  hundred 
by  this  time — he  stood  on  a  chair  so  that  all  of 
them  could  hear  what  he  had  to  say,  and  told  them 
the  exact  situation. 

"Now,  men,  we  can  pull  through  all  right  if 
you'll  help  out  now,"  he  concluded.  "You  krtow 
the  kind  of  car  we're  selling,  and  the  price,  and 
you  know  what  the  new  one  did  yesterday.  We 
can  get  through  the  winter  on  our  unfinished  or 
ders  if  we  never  get  that  Chicago  check.  Next 
year  we'll  have  a  big  business.  But  it  all  depends 
on  you.  If  you  quit  now  we're  done  for.  What 
about  it,  will  you  stay?" 

"Sure,  Mr.  Ford."  "You  bet  we  will,  old 
man!"  "We're  with  you;  don't  you  forget  it!" 
they  said.  Before  they  left  the  plant  most  of 
them  came  up  to  assure  him  personally  that  they 
would  stand  by  the  Ford  company.  Next  day 
they  all  arrived  promptly  for  work,  and  during 
the  week  they  broke  all  previous  records  in  the 
number  of  cars  turned  out. 

"War  between  capital  and  labor  is  just  like  any 
other  kind  of  war,"  Henry  Ford  says  to-day.  "It 


128     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

happens  because  people  do  not  understand  each 
other.  The  boss  ought  to  show  his  books  to  his 
employees,  let  them  see  what  he's  working  for. 
They're  just  as  intelligent  as  he  is,  and  if  he  needs 
help  they'll  turn  in  and  work  twenty-four  hours 
a  day,  if  they  have  to,  to  keep  the  business  going. 
More  than  that,  they'll  use  their  heads  for  him. 
They'll  help  him  in  hundreds  of  ways  he  never 
would  think  of. 

"The  only  trouble  is  that  people  make  a  dis 
tinction  between  practical  things  and  spiritual 
qualities.  I  tell  you,  loyalty,  and  friendliness, 
and  helping  the  other  man  along  are  the  only 
really  valuable  things  in  this  world,  and  they 
bring  all  the  'practical'  advantages  along  with 
them  every  time.  If  every  one  of  us  had  the 
courage  to  believe  that,  and  act  on  it,  war  and 
waste  and  misery  of  all  kinds  would  be  wiped  out 
over  night." 


CHAPTER  XXII 

AUTOMOBILES  FOR  THE  MASSES 

IN  a  short  time  Couzens  returned  from  Chi 
cago,  bringing  not  only  the  delayed  check,  but 
several  orders  as  well,  which  he  had  obtained 
largely  because  of  the  astounding  record  made  by 
the  Ford  car  in  its  race  over  the  ice  on  Lake  St. 
Clair. 

The  Ford  company  was  not  yet  firmly  estab 
lished,  but  prospects  were  bright.  America  was 
awaking  to  the  possibilities  of  the  automobile, 
not  merely  as  a  machine  for  spectacular  exhibi 
tions  of  daring  and  skill  at  track  meetings,  or  as 
the  plaything  of  wealthy  men,  but  as  a  practical 
time  and  labor-saver  for  the  average  person. 

The  automobile  industry  rose  almost  over 
night.  Orders  poured  into  the  offices  of  com 
panies  already  organized;  new  companies  were 
formed  by  dozens,  capitalized  at  millions  of  dol 
lars.  Fly-by-night  concerns  sprang  up  like  mush 
rooms,  flooded  the  country  with  stock-selling 
schemes,  established  factories  where  parts  of  mo 
tor  cars,  bought  elsewhere,  were  assembled.  For 
tunes  were  made  and  lost  and  made  again.  Al 
most  every  day  saw  new  cars  on  the  market. 

Every  one  wanted  an  automobile.  It  was  a 
129 


130     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

luxury,  it  appealed  to  our  longing  to  have  some 
thing  just  a  little  better  than  our  neighbors  could 
afford.  At  the  same  time  its  obvious  usefulness 
was  an  argument  which  overcame  economy.  The 
comic  supplements,  those  faithful  reflectors  of 
American  life  in  terms  of  the  ridiculous,  played 
with  every  variation  of  the  theme,  "He  mort 
gaged  the  home  to  buy  an  automobile.'' 

Amid  this  mounting  excitement,  in  spite  of 
millions  to  be  made  by  building  a  car  bigger,  finer, 
more  beautiful  and  luxurious  than  those  of  his 
competitors,  Henry  Ford  still  clung  firmly  to  his 
Idea.  He  seems  to  have  been,  at  that  time,  the 
only  automobile  manufacturer  who  realized  that 
the  automobile  supplied  a  real  need  of  the  aver 
age  man,  and  that  the  average  man  is  a  hard 
working,  frugal  individual,  used  to  living  with 
out  those  things  he  must  mortgage  his  home  to 
get. 

'The  automobile  of  those  days  was  like  a 
steam  yacht,"  Ford  says.  "It  was  built  for  only 
a  few  people.  Now  anything  that  is  good  for 
only  a  few  people  is  really  no  good.  It's  got  to 
be  good  for  everybody  or  in  the  end  it  will  not 
survive." 

Radical  philosophy,  that.  You  might  hear  it 
from  a  street  corner  orator,  one  of  that  dissatis 
fied  multitude  which  will  insist,  in  spite  of  all  the 
good  things  we  have  in  this  country,  that  merely 
because  those  things  are  not  good  for  them  they 
are  not  good.  There  is  something  of  Marx  in 


AUTOMOBILES  FOR  THE  MASSES       131 

such  a  statement,  something  of  George  Washing 
ton,  even  something  of  Christianity.  No  wonder 
men  were  astounded  by  the  notion  that  success 
could  be  founded  on  a  theory  like  that. 

"It's  plain  common  sense,  I  tell  you,"  Ford  in 
sisted,  and  in  spite  of  good  advice,  in  spite  of 
sound  business  reasoning,  that  obstinate  man  went 
on  in  his  own  way  and  acted  on  that  belief. 

The  Ford  cars  were  cheap.  Already  under- 
priced  nearly  a  thousand  dollars  in  comparison 
with  other  cars,  they  were  to  be  sold  still  cheaper, 
Ford  insisted.  Every  cent  he  could  save  in  con 
struction,  in  factory  managment,  in  shrewd  buy 
ing  of  material  was  deducted  from  the  selling 
price. 

The  cars  sold.  Orders  accumulated  faster 
than  they  could  be  filled  in  the  shop  on  Mack  ave 
nue.  The  profits  went  back  into  the  factory. 
More  men  were  added  to  the  pay-roll,  more  ma 
chinery  was  installed,  and  still  the  orders  came 
and  the  output  could  not  keep  up  with  them. 

Mrs.  Ford  could  afford  to  buy  her  own  hats 
instead  of  making  them,  to  get  a  new  set  of  furni 
ture  for  the  parlor,  to  purchase  as  many  gloves 
and  shoes  as  she  wanted.  She  did  these  things; 
she  even  talked  of  getting  a  hired  girl  to  do  the 
cooking.  But  Ford  himself  made  little  change 
in  his  way  of  living.  He  had  always  dressed 
warmly  and  comfortably,  eaten  when  he  was  hun 
gry,  slept  soundly  enough  on  an  ordinary  bed. 


132     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

He  saw  no  way  to  increase  his  comforts  by  spend 
ing  more  money  on  himself. 

"More  than  enough  money  to  keep  him  com 
fortable  is  no  use  to  a  man,"  he  says.  "You  can't 
squander  money  on  yourself  without  hurting 
yourself.  Money's  only,  a  lubricant  to  keep  busi 
ness  going." 

He  continued  to  work  hard,  designing  simpler, 
cheaper  cars,  struggling  with  business  difficulties 
as  they  arose,  planning  a  new  factory.  Most  of 
all  he  was  interested  in  the  new  factory. 

The  success  of  his  four-cylinder  car  provided 
money  enough  to  warrant  building  it  at  last.  A 
small  tract  of  land  on  Piquette  avenue  was  bought 
and  Ford  prepared  to  move  from  the  rented 
Mack  avenue  place. 

The  watch-factory  dream  was  finally  to  be 
realized.  Henry  Ford  declared  that  by  a  large 
equipment  of  special  machinery  and  a  sympa 
thetic  organization  of  the  work,  cars  could  be 
produced  at  a  hitherto  unheard-of  price.  *He 
planned  to  the  smallest  detail,  to  the  most  minute 
fraction  of  space,  time,  labor,  the  production  of 
those  cars. 

Every  part  was  to  be  machined  to  exact  size. 
No  supplementary  fitting  in  the  assembling  room 
was  to  be  necessary.  From  the  time  the  raw 
iron  entered  one  end  of  the  factory  till  the  fin 
ished  car  rolled  away  from  the  other  end,  there 
was  not  to  be  a  moment's  delay,  a  wasted  motion. 
The  various  parts,  all  alike  to  the  fraction  of  an 


AUTOMOBILES  FOR  THE  MASSES       133 

inch,  were  to  fit  together  with  automatic  pre 
cision.  And  Ford  announced  that  he  would  pro 
duce  10,000  cars  in  a  single  year. 

The  manufacturing  world  was  stunned  by  the 
announcement.  Then  it  laughed.  Very  few  peo 
ple  believed  that  Ford  would  go  far  with  such  a 
radical  departure  from  all  accepted  practice.  But 
the  new  building  was  finished,  Ford  installed  his 
machinery  according  to  his  plans,  and  when  the 
wheels  began  to  turn  the  world  learned  a  new 
lesson  in  efficiency. 

Still  Ford's  success  in  the  automobile  field  was 
not  easily  won.  As  a  poor,  hard-working  me 
chanic,  he  had  fought  weariness  and  poverty  and 
ridicule,  to  build  his  motor  car;  as  an  unknown 
inventor,  still  poor,  he  had  struggled  for  a  foot 
hold  in  the  business  world  and  got  it ;  now  he  was 
in  for  a  long,  expensive  legal  battle  before  he 
should  be  able  to  feel  secure  in  his  success. 

The  Association  of  Licensed  Automobile  Man 
ufacturers,  a  combination  of  seventy-three  of  the 
biggest  motor  car  companies,  brought  suit  against 
the  Ford  company  to  recover  tremendous  sums 
of  money  because  of  Ford's  alleged  violation  of 
the  Seldon  patent. 

Seldon  held  a  basic  patent  covering  the  use  of 
the  gasoline  engine  as  motive  power  in  self-pro 
pelled  vehicles.  When  automobiles  began  to  be 
put  on  the  market,  he  claimed  his  right  under  that 
patent  to  a  royalty  on  all  such  vehicles.  Other 
automobile  manufacturers  almost  without  ex- 


134     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

ception  acceded  to  his  claim  and  operated  under 
a  lease  from  him,  adding  the  royalty  to  the  selling 
price. 

Henry  Ford  balked.  He  had  been  running  a 
self-propelled  gasoline  engine  long  before  Seldon 
had  applied  for  his  patent;  furthermore,  the 
royalties  interfered  with  the  long-cherished 
dream  of  cheapening  his  cars.  He  flatly  refused 
to  make  the  payments. 

The  lessees  of  the  Seldon  rights,  perceiving  in 
Ford  a  dangerous  adversary  in  the  automobile 
field,  who  would  become  still  more  dangerous  if 
he  succeeded  in  eliminating  the  royalty  payments 
from  his  manufacturing  costs,  immediately  began 
to  fight  him  with  all  the  millions  at  their  com 
mand. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

FIGHTING  THE  SELDON  PATENT 

BY  sheer  force  of  an  idea,  backed  only  by  hard 
work,  Henry  Ford  had  established  a  new  princi 
ple  in  mechanics ;  he  had  created  new  methods  in 
the  manufacturing  world — methods  substantially 
those  which  prevail  in  manufacturing  to-day; 
now  he  entered  the  legal  field.  His  fight  on  the 
Seldon  patent — a  fight  that  lasted  nearly  ten 
years — was  a  sensation  not  only  in  the  automo 
bile  world,  but  among  lawyers  everywhere. 

The  intricacies  of  the  case  baffled  the  jurists 
before  whom  it  was  tried.  Time  and  again  de 
cisions  adverse  to  Ford  were  handed  down.  Each 
time  Ford  came  back  again,  more  determined 
than  before,  carried  the  contest  to  a  higher  court 
and  fought  the  battle  over  again. 

On  one  side  the  Association  of  Licensed  Auto 
mobile  Manufacturers  was  struggling  to  save 
patent  rights  for  which  they  had  paid  vast  sums 
of  money,  to  maintain  high  prices  for  automo 
biles,  and  to  protect  their  combination  of  manu 
facturing  interests.  On  the  other,  Ford  was 
fighting  to  release  the  industry  from  paying 
tribute  to  a  patent  which  he  believed  unsound,  to 
smash  the  combination  of  manufacturers,  and  to 

135 


136     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

keep  down  his  own  factory  costs  so  that  he  could 
make  a  still  cheaper  car. 

With  the  first  adverse  decision,  the  A.  L.  A. 
M.  carried  the  fight  into  the  newspapers.  Most 
of  us  can  recall  the  days  when  from  coast  to 
coast  the  newspapers  of  America  blossomed  with 
page  advertisements  warning  people  against  buy 
ing  Ford  cars,  asserting  that  every  owner  of  a 
Ford  car  was  liable  to  prosecution  for  damages 
under  the  Seldon  patent  rights. 

Those  were  chaotic  years  in  the  industry.  The 
hysteria  which  followed  the  huge  profit-making 
of  the  first  companies,  checked  only  temporarily 
by  the  panic  of  1907-8,  mounted  again  in  a  rising 
wave  of  excitement.  Dozens  of  companies  sprang 
up,  sold  stock,  assembled  a  few  cars,  and  went 
down  in  ruin.  Buyers  of  their  cars  were  left 
stranded  with  automobiles  for  which  they  could 
not  get  new  parts. 

It  was  asserted  that  the  Ford  Motor  Company, 
unable  to  pay  the  enormous  sums  accruing  if  the 
Seldon  patent  was  upheld,  would  be  one  of  the 
companies  to  fail.  Buyers  were  urged  to  play 
safe  by  purchasing  a  recognized  car — a  car  made 
by  the  licensed  manufacturers. 

Ford,  already  involved  in  a  business  fight 
against  the  association  and  its  millions,  thus 
found  himself  in  danger  of  losing  the  confidence 
of  the  public. 

The  story  of  those  years  is  one  which  cannot 
be  adequately  told.  Ford  was  working  harder 


FIGHTING  THE  SELDON  PATENT       137 

than  lie  had  ever  done  while  he  was  building  his 
first  car  in  the  old  shed.  He  was  one  of  the  first 
men  at  the  factory  every  morning,  and  long  after 
Detroit  was  asleep  he  was  still  hard  at  work,  con 
ferring  with  lawyers,  discussing  with  Couzens 
the  latest  disaster  that  threatened,  struggling  with 
business  problems,  meeting  emergencies  in  the 
selling  field,  and  always  planning  to  better  the 
factory  management  and  to  lower  the  price  and 
increase  the  efficiency  of  the  car. 

The  car  sold.  Ford  had  built  it  for  common 
men,  for  the  vast  body  of  America's  middle-class 
people,  and  it  was  cheap  enough  to  be  within  their 
reach.  Ford  knew  that  if  he  could  keep  their 
confidence  he  could  win  in  the  end. 

He  met  the  attack  of  the  A.  L.  A.  M.  by  print 
ing  huge  advertisements  guaranteeing  purchasers 
of  his  cars  from  prosecution  under  the  Seldon 
patents,  and  backed  his  guarantee  by  the  bond 
of  a  New  York  security  company.  Then  he  ap 
pealed  the  patent  case  and  kept  on  fighting. 

In  1908  the  farmer  boy  who  had  started  out 
twenty  years  before  with  nothing  but  his  bare 
hands  and  an  idea  found  himself  at  the  head  of 
one  of  America's  largest  business  organizations. 
That  year  his  factory  made  and  sold  6,398  cars. 

Every  machine  sold  increased  his  liabilities  in 
case  he  lost  the  patent  fight,  but  the  business  was 
now  on  a  firm  foundation.  Agencies  had  been 
established  in  all  parts  of  the  world,  orders  came 
pouring  in.  Profits  were  rolling  up.  Ford  found 


138     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

his  net  earnings  increasing  faster  than  he  could 
possibly  put  them  back  into  the  business. 

At  the  end  of  that  year  he  and  Couzens  sat  in 
their  offices  going  over  the  balance  sheets  of  the 
company.  The  size  of  the  bank  balance  was 
most  satisfactory.  The  factory  was  running  to 
the  limit  of  its  capacity,  orders  were  waiting. 
Prospects  were  bright  for  the  following  season. 
Ford  leaned  back  in  his  chair. 

"Well,  I  guess  we're  out  of  the  woods,  all 
right,"  he  said.  He  put  his  hands  in  his  pockets 
and  looked  thoughtfully  at  the  ceiling.  "Remem 
ber  that  time  in  the  Mack  avenue  place,"  he  be 
gan,  "when  that  Chicago  check  didn't  come  in, 
and  we  couldn't  pay  the  men  ?" 

"I  should  say  I  do!  And  the  day  we  got  the 
first  order  from  Cleveland.  Remember  how  you 
worked  in  the  shop  yourself  to  get  it  out?" 

"And  you  hustled  out  and  got  material  on  sixty 
days'  time?  And  the  boys  worked  all  night,  and 
we  had  to  wait  till  the  money  came  from  Cleve 
land  before  we  could  give  them  their  overtime? 
That  was  a  great  bunch  of  men  we  had  then." 

They  began  to  talk  them  over.  Most  of  them 
were  managers  of  departments  now;  one  was 
handling  the  sales  force,  another  had  developed 
into  a  driver  and  won  many  trophies  and  broken 
many  records  with  the  Ford  car;  Wills  was  su 
perintendent  of  the  factory. 

"I  tell  you,  Couzens,  you  and  I  have  been  at 
the  head  of  the  concern,  and  we've  done  some  big 


FIGHTING  THE  SELDON  PATENT       139 

things  together,  but  if  it  hadn't  been  for  the  men 
we'd  be  a  long  way  from  where  we  are  to-day," 
Ford  said  at  last. 

"Now  we  have  some  money  we  don't  need  for 
the  business,  we  ought  to  divide  with  them.  Let's 
do  it" 

"I'm  with  you!"  Couzens  said  heartily,  and 
reached  for  his  pencil.  Eagerly  as  two  boys, 
they  sat  there  for  another  hour  figuring.  They 
began  with  checks  for  the  men  they  remembered, 
men  who  had  been  with  them  in  the  first  days  of 
the  company,  men  who  had  done  some  special 
thing  which  won  their  notice,  men  who  were 
making  good  records  in  the  shops  or  on  the  sales 
force.  But  there  seemed  no  place  to  draw  the 
line. 

"After  all,  every  man  who's  working  for  us  is 
helping,"  Ford  decided. 

"Let's  give  every  one  of  them  a  Christmas 
present."  Couzens  agreed.  "We'll  have  the 
clerical  department  figure  it  out.  The  men  who 
have  been  with  us  longest  the  most,  and  so  on 
down  to  the  last  errand  boy  that's  been  with  us 
a  year.  What  do  you  say  ?" 

Ford  said  yes  with  enthusiasm,  and  so  it  was 
settled.  That  year  every  employee  of  the  com 
pany  received  an  extra  check  in  his  December 
pay  envelope.  Ford  had  reached  a  point  in  his 
business  life  where  he  must  stop  and  consider 
what  he  should  do  with  the  money  his  work  had 


140     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

brought  him,  and  those  extra  checks  were  the  first 
result. 

For  twenty  years  Ford  had  spent  all  his  energy, 
all  his  time  and  thought  in  one  thing — his  work. 
If  he  had  divided  his  interests,  if  he  had  allowed 
a  liking  for  amusement,  ease,  finer  clothes,  ad 
miration,  to  hinder  his  work  in  the  old  shed,  he 
would  never  have  built  his  car.  If  he  had  cared 
more  for  personal  pleasure  and  applause  than  he 
did  for  his  idea,  he  would  have  allowed  his  fac 
tory  plan  to  be  altered,  twisted  out  of  shape  and 
forgotten  when  he  first  found  capital  to  manu 
facture  the  car.  But  from  the  day  he  left  his 
farm  till  now  he  has  subordinated  everything 
else  to  his  machine  idea. 

He  applied  it  first  to  an  engine,  then  to  a  fac 
tory.  He  fought  through  innumerable  difficulties 
to  make  those  ideas  into  realities.  He  destroyed 
old  conceptions  of  mechanics  and  of  factory  man 
agement.  He  built  up  a  great  financial  success. 

Now  he  found  himself  with  a  new  problem  to 
face — the  problem  of  a  great  fortune  piling  up 
in  his  hands. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 


"THE  GREATEST  GOOD  TO  THE  GREATEST  NUMBER" 


THE  response  to  that  first  Christmas  gift  from 
the  Ford  company  to  its  employees  was  another 
proof  of  Ford's  theory  that  friendliness  pays.  In 
the  following  month  the  production  of  cars  broke 
all  January  records.  Salesmen,  with  a  new  feel 
ing  of  loyalty  to  the  firm,  increased  their  efforts, 
worked  with  greater  enthusiasm  and  their  orders 
jumped. 

The  fight  with  the  association  still  raged  in  the 
courts  and  in  the  newspapers,  but  the  factory 
wheels  were  turning  faster  than  ever  before. 
More  cars  were  pouring  out,  more  people  were 
buying.  That  year  the  Ford  organization  made 
and  sold  10,607  cars.  Ford  had  made  good  his 
prophecy  that  the  new  factory  would  produce 
10,000  cars  in  one  year. 

The  phenomenal  growth  of  his  business  had 
begun.  His  own  fortune  was  doubling  and 
doubling  again.  America  had  produced  another 
self-made  millionaire. 

Ford  himself  believes  that  any  one  who  will 
pay  the  price  he  has  paid  can  make  a  financial  suc 
cess  as  great. 

"Poverty  doesn't  hold  a  man  down,"  he  says. 
141 


142     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

"Money  doesn't  amount  to  anything — it  has  no 
real  value  whatever.  Any  young  man  who  has 
a  good  idea  and  works  hard  enough  will  succeed  ; 
money  will  come  to  him.  What  do  I  mean  by  a 
good  idea?  I  mean  an  idea  that  will  work  out 
for  the  best  interests  of  every  one — an  idea  for 
something  that  will  benefit  the  world.  That's  the 
kind  of  an  idea  the  world  wants." 

This  country  has  produced  hundreds  of  men 
whose  lives  prove  this  statement — men  who  have 
built  railroads,  telephones,  telegraph  systems, 
great  merchandising  organizations.  These  men 
have  subordinated  every  personal  pleasure  to 
their  work.  They  have  exhausted  their  minds 
and  bodies,  driven  themselves  mercilessly,  used 
every  ounce  of  energy  and  ability,  and  won. 

The  tragedy  for  them  and  for  our  country  is 
that  in  winning  the  fight  most  of  them  have  lost 
their  perspective  on  it.  They  themselves  have 
become  absorbed  by  the  machine  they  have  built 
up.  The  money  they  have  amassed  usually  means 
very  little  to  them,  but  business  is  their  passion. 
With  millions  upon  millions  piling  up  to  their 
credit,  they  continue  to  hold  down  wages,  to  pro 
tect  their  profits,  to  keep  the  business  running  as 
it  has  always  run. 

That  business  has  been  built  only  because  fun 
damentally  it  was  for  "the  greatest  good  to  the 
greatest  number,"  but  in  the  long  fight  they  have 
lost  sight  of  that  fact.  Let  a  new  project  arise 


"THE  GREATEST  GOOD"          143 

which  is  for  the  general  good  and  "it  will  hurt 
business!"  they  cry  in  alarm. 

Ford  kept  his  viewpoint.  Partly  because  of  his 
years  on  the  farm,  where  he  worked  shoulder  to 
shoulder  with  other  men  and  learned  essential 
democracy;  partly  because  most  of  his  work  had 
been  in  mechanics  rather  than  in  business,  but 
most  of  all  because  he  is  a  simple,  straight-think 
ing  man,  the  tremendous  Ford  organization  did 
not  absorb  him, 

He  had  applied  his  machine  idea  first  to  an  en 
gine,  then  to  a  factory ;  in  time  he  was  to  apply 
it  to  society  as  a  whole. 

"That  Christmas  present  of  ours  is  paying  bet 
ter  dividends  than  any  money  we  ever  spent,"  he 
said  to  Couzens  with  a  grin.  "First  thing  we 
know,  the  men'll  be  paying  us  back  more  than  we 
gave  them.  Look  here."  He  spread  on  Couzens' 
desk  a  double  handful  of  letters  from  the  men. 

"They  like  it,"  he  said  soberly.  "Some  of 
them  say  they  were  worrying  about  Christmas 
bills,  and  so  on.  Those  checks  took  a  load  off 
their  minds,  and  they're  pitching  in  and  working 
hard  to  show  they  appreciate  it.  I  guess  in  the 
long  run  anything  that  is  good  for  the  men  is 
good  for  the  company." 

In  the  months  that  followed  he  continued  to 
turn  over  in  his  mind  various  ideas  which  oc 
curred  to  him,  based  on  that  principle. 

The  Ford  employees  and  agents  now  numbered 
tens  of  thousands.  They  were  scattered  all  over 


144     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

the  earth,  from  Bombay  to  Nova  Scotia,  Switzer 
land,  Peru,  Bermuda,  Africa,  Alaska,  India — 
everywhere  were  workers,  helping  Ford.  Black 
men  in  turbans,  yellow  men  in  embroidered  robes, 
men  of  all  races  and  languages,  speaking,  think 
ing,  living  in  ways  incomprehensible  to  that  quiet 
man  who  sat  in  his  office  in  Detroit,  were  part  of 
the  vast  machine  out  of  which  his  millions  poured. 

He  thought  it  over — that  great  machine.  He 
knew  machines.  He  knew  that  the  smallest  part 
of  one  was  as  necessary  as  the  largest,  that  every 
nut  and  screw  was  indispensable  to  the  success  of 
the  whole.  And  while  he  brooded  over  the 
mighty  machine  his  genius  had  created,  the 
thought  slowly  formed  itself  in  his  mind  that 
those  multiplying  millions  of  his  were  the  weak 
spot  in  the  organization.  Those  millions  repre 
sented  energy,  and  through  him  they  were  drain 
ing  out  of  the  machine,  accumulating  in  a  useless, 
idle  store.  Some  way  they  must  be  put  back. 

"Everybody  helps  me,"  he  said.  "If  I'm  going 
to  do  my  part  I  must  help  everybody !"  * 

A  new  problem  filled  his  mind.  How  should 
he  put  his  money  back  into  that  smooth,  efficient 
organization  in  such  a  way  as  to  help  all  parts  of 
it  without  disorganizing  it?  It  was  now  a  part  of 
the  business  system  of  the  world,  founded  on 
financial  and  social  principles  which  underlie  all 
society.  It  was  no  small  matter  to  alter  it. 

Meantime,  there  were  immediate  practical 
necessities  to  be  met.  His  business  had  far  out- 


"THE  GREATEST  GOOD"          145 

grown  the  Piquette  avenue  plant.  A  new  factory 
must  be  built.  He  bought  a  tract  of  276  acres 
in  the  northern  part  of  Detroit  and  began  to  plan 
the  construction  of  his  present  factory,  a  num 
ber  of  huge  buildings  covering  more  than  forty- 
seven  acres. 

In  this  mammoth  plant  Ford  had  at  last  the 
opportunity,  unhampered  by  any  want  of  capital, 
to  put  into  operation  his  old  ideas  of  factory  man 
agement.  Here  1800  men  were  to  work,  quickly, 
efficiently,  without  the  loss  of  a  moment  or  a  mo 
tion,  all  of  them  integral  parts  of  one  great  ma 
chine.  Each  department  makes  one  part  of  the 
Ford  car,  complete,  from  raw  material  to  the  fin 
ished  product,  and  every  part  is  carried  swiftly 
and  directly,  by  gravity,  to  the  assembling  room. 

But  Ford's  new  idea  also  began  to  express  it 
self  here.  He  meant  to  consider  not  only  the 
efficiency  but  the  happiness  and  comfort  of  his 
men. 

The  walls  were  made  of  plate  glass,  so  that 
every  part  of  the  workrooms  were  light  and  well 
ventilated.  One  whole  department,  employing 
500  men,  was  established  to  do  nothing  but  sweep 
floors,  wash  windows,  look  after  sanitary  condi 
tions  generally.  The  floors  are  scrubbed  every 
week  with  hot  water  and  alkali.  Twenty-five 
men  are  employed  constantly  in  painting  the  walls 
and  ceilings,  keeping  everything  fresh  and  clean. 

That  winter  the  Christmas  checks  went  again 
to  all  the  employees.  Ford  was  still  working  out 


146     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

a  real  plan  by  which  his  millions  could  help; 
meantime,  he  divided  his  profits  in  this  makeshift 
fashion. 

The  following  year  the  company  moved  to  its 
new  quarters.  In  that  atmosphere  of  light  and 
comfort  the  men  worked  better  than  ever  before. 
Production  broke  another  record — 38,528  cars 
in  one  year  were  made  and  sold. 

"And  the  automobile  world  is  waiting  to  hear 
the  next  announcement  from  Henry  Ford,"  said 
a  trade  journal  at  that  time.  "Whether  or  not 
he  has  another  sensation  in  store  is  the  livest 
topic  of  discussion  in  Detroit  manufacturing  cir 
cles — nay,  even  throughout  the  world." 

Henry  Ford  was  preparing  another  sensation, 
but  this  time  it  was  to  be  in  a  larger  field.  He 
had  startled  the  world,  first,  with  a  motor  car, 
next  with  a  factory.  Now  he  was  thinking  of 
broad  economic  problems. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

FIVE  DOLLARS  A  DAY  MINIMUM 

THE  Seldon  patent  fight  had  continued  through 
all  the  early  years  of  Ford's  struggle  to  establish 
himself  in  business.  At  last  it  was  settled.  Ford 
won  it.  The  whole  industry  was  freed  from  an 
oppressive  tax  and  his  long  fight  was  over. 

Immediately,  of  course,  other  cars  came  into 
the  low-priced  field.  Other  manufacturers, 
tardily  following  Ford,  began  the  downward  pres 
sure  in  prices  which  now  makes  it  possible  for 
thousands  of  persons  with  only  moderate  means 
to  own  automobiles.  For  the  first  time  Ford 
faced  competition  in  his  own  price  class.  In 
numerable  business  problems  confronted  the 
farmer-mechanic,  from  the  time  he  opened  his 
office  doors  in  the  early  morning  until  the  last 
workman  had  left  the  plant  and  only  his  light  was 
burning.  Business  men  came,  financiers,  sales 
men,  lawyers,  designers.  Every  day  for  two 
hours  he  conferred  with  his  superintendents  and 
foremen  in  the  main  factory.  Every  detail  of 
the  business  was  under  his  supervision.  A 
smaller  man  or  a  less  simple  one,  would  have  been 
absorbed  by  the  sheer  mass  of  work. 

Ford  settled  every  problem  by  his  own  simple 
147 


148     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

rule,  "Do  what  is  fundamentally  best  for  every 
body.  It  will  work  out  for  our  interests  in  the 
end." 

And  always  he  was  pondering  the  big  problem 
of  putting  back  into  active  use  the  millions  that 
were  accumulating  to  his  credit.  Every  year  the 
price  was  lowered  on  his  cars,  following  his  origi 
nal  policy  of  making  the  automobile  cheap.  Still 
the  sales  increased  by  leaps  and  bounds,  and  his 
margin  of  profit  on  each  car  mounted  into  a 
greater  total. 

"The  whole  system  is  wrong/*  he  says.  "Peo 
ple  have  the  wrong  idea  of  money.  They  think 
it  is  valuable  in  itself.  They  try  to  get  all  they 
can,  and  they've  built  up  a  system  where  one  man 
has  too  much  and  another  not  enough.  As  long 
as  that  system  is  working  there  does  not  seem  any 
way  to  even  things  up.  But  I  made  up  my  mind 
to  do  what  I  could. 

"Money  valuable  ?  I  tell  you,  gold  is  the  least 
valuable  metal  in  the  world.  Edison  says  it  is  no 
good  at  all,  it  is  too  soft  to  make  a  single  useful 
article.  Suppose  there  was  only  one  loaf  of  bread 
in  the  world,  would  all  the  money  on  earth  buy  it 
from  the  man  who  had  it?  Money  itself  is  noth 
ing,  absolutely  nothing.  It  is  only  valuable  as  a 
transmitter,  a  method  of  handling  things  that  are 
valuable.  The  minute  one  man  gets  more  of  it 
than  he  can  use  to  buy  the  real  things  he  needs, 
the  surplus  is  sheer  waste.  It  is  stored-up  energy 
that  is  no  good  to  anybody. 


1  FIVE  DOLLARS  A  DAY  MINIMUM      149 

"Every  bit  of  energy  that  is  wasted  that  way 
hurts  the  whole  world,  and  in  the  end  it  hurts  the 
man  who  has  it  as  much  as  it  hurts  anybody. 
Look  here,  you  make  a  machine  to  do  something 
useful,  don't  you?  Well,  then,  if  it  is  built  so 
that  it  keeps  wasting  energy,  doesn't  the  whole 
machine  wear  itself  out  without  doing  half  as 
much  as  it  should  ?  Isn't  that  last  energy  bad  for 
every  part  of  the  machine?  Well,  that  is  the 
way  the  world  is  running  now.  The  whole  sys 
tem  is  wrong." 

A  very  little  thought  brings  almost  any  of  us 
to  that  conclusion,  especially  if  the  thinker  is  one 
whose  surplus  money  is  all  in  the  other  man's 
bank  account;  but  Ford  held  to  that  thought,  as 
few  of  us  would,  with  the  surplus  millions  in  his 
own  hands.  Furthermore,  he  proposed  not 
merely  to  think,-  but  to  act  on  that  thought. 

He  is  not  a  man  to  act  hastily.  Before  he  made 
his  engine  he  worked  out  the  drawings.  Before 
he  distributed  his  money  he  selected  200  men 
from  the  workers  in  his  shop  and  sent  them  out 
to  learn  all  they  could  of  the  living  conditions  of 
the  other  thousands.  They  worked  for  a  year, 
and  at  the  end  of  that  time  Ford,  going  carefully 
over  their  reports,  saw  plainly  where  his  surplus 
money  should  go. 

Over  4,000  of  the  18,000  men  working  in  the 
Ford  plant  were  living  in  dire  poverty,  in  un 
speakable  home  conditions.  Families  were  huddled 
into  tenements,  where  in  wet  weather  water  stood 


ISO    HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

on  the  floor.  Wives  were  ill,  uncared  for ;  babies 
were  dressed  in  rags.  Another  5,000  men  in  his 
employ  were  living  in  conditions  which  could 
only  be  called  "fair."  Only  364  out  of  18,000 
owned  their  own  homes. 

Yet  the  employees  in  the  Ford  shops  were 
above  the  average  of  factory  workingmen. 
They  were  paid  the  regular  scale  of  wages,  not 
overworked,  and  their  surroundings  at  the  plant 
were  sanitary  and  pleasant. 

In  those  terrible  figures  Ford  was  seeing  merely 
the  ordinary,  accustomed  result  of  the  wasted  en 
ergy  represented  in  those  idle  millions  of  dollars. 

He  went  over  them  thoroughly,  noting  that 
the  scale  of  living  grew  steadily  better  as  the  sal 
aries  increased,  observing  that  the  most  wretched 
class  was  mainly  composed  of  foreign  workmen, 
ignorant,  unskilled  labor,  most  of  them  unable  to 
speak  English.  He  figured,  thought,  drew  his 
own  conclusions. 

He  had  been  studying  relief  plans,  methods 
of  factory  management  in  Germany,  welfare 
work  of  all  kinds.  When  he  had  finished  his  con 
sideration  of  those  reports  he  threw  overboard 
all  the  plans  other  people  had  made  and  an 
nounced  his  own. 

"Every  man  who  works  for  me  is  going  to  get 
enough  for  a  comfortable  living,"  he  said.  "If 
an  able-bodied  man  can't  earn  that,  he's  either 
lazy  or  ignorant.  If  he's  lazy,  he's  sick.  We'll 
have  a  hospital.  If  he's  ignorant,  he  wants  to 


FIVE  DOLLARS  A  DAY  MINIMUM       151 

learn.  We'll  have  a  school.  Meantime,  figure 
out  in  the  accounting  bureau  a  scale  of  profit- 
sharing  that  will  make  every  man's  earnings  at 
least  five  dollars  a  day.  The  man  that  gets  the 
smallest  wages  gets  the  biggest  share  of  the 
profits.  He  needs  it  most." 

On  January  12,  1914,  Ford  more  than  satis 
fied  the  expectant  manufacturers  of  the  world. 
He  launched  into  the  industrial  world  a  most 
startling  bombshell. 

"Five  dollars  a  day  for  every  workman  in  the 
Ford  factory!" 

"He's  crazy!"  other  manufacturers  said, 
aghast.  "Why,  those  dirty,  ignorant  foreigners 
don't  earn  half  that!  You  can't  run  a  business 
that  way!" 

"That  man  Ford  will  upset  the  whole  industrial 
situation.  What  is  he  trying  to  do,  anyhow?" 
they  demanded  when  every  Detroit  factory  work 
man  grew  restless. 

The  news  spread  rapidly.  Everywhere  work 
ers  dropped  their  tools  and  hurried  to  the  Ford 
factory.  Five  dollars  a  day! 

When  Ford  reached  the  factory  in  the  morn 
ing  of  the  second  day  after  his  announcement,  he 
found  Woodward  avenue  crowded  with  men 
waiting  to  get  a  job  in  the  shops.  An  hour  later 
the  crowds  had  jammed  into  a  mob,  which 
massed  outside  the  buildings  and  spread  far  into 
adjoining  streets,  pushing,  struggling,  fighting  to 
get  closer  to  the  doors. 


152     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

It  was  not  safe  to  open  them.  That  mass  of 
humanity,  pushed  from  behind,  would  have 
wrecked  the  offices.  The  manager  of  the  employ 
ment  department  opened  a  window  and  shouted 
to  the  frantic  crowd  that  there  were  no  jobs,  but 
the  sound  of  his  voice  was  lost  in  the  roar  that 
greeted  him.  He  shut  the  window  and  telephoned 
the  police  department  for  reserves. 

Still  the  crowds  increased  every  moment  by 
new  groups  of  men  wildly  eager  to  get  a  job 
which  would  pay  them  a  comfortable  living. 
Ford  looked  down  at  them  from  his  window. 

"Can't  you  make  them  understand  we  haven't 
any  jobs?"  he  asked  the  employment  manager. 
The  man,  disheveled,  breathing  hard,  and  hoarse 
with  his  efforts  to  make  his  voice  heard,  shook 
his  head. 

"The  police  are  coming,"  he  said. 

"Then  there'll  be  somebody  hurt,"  Ford  pre 
dicted.  "We  can't  have  that.  Get  the  fire  hose 
and  turn  it  on  the  crowd.  That  will  do  the  busi 
ness/' 

A  moment  later  a  solid  two-inch  stream  of 
water  shot  from  the  doors  of  the  Ford  factory. 
It  swept  the  struggling  men  half  off  their  feet; 
knocked  the  breath  from  their  bodies;  left  them 
gasping,  startled,  dripping.  They  scattered.  In 
a  few  moments  the  white  stream  from  the  hose 
was  sweeping  back  and  forth  over  a  widening 
spa.ce  bare  of  men.  When  the  police  arrived  the 
crowd  was  so  dispersed  that  the  men  in  uniform 


FIVE  DOLLARS  A  DAY  MINIMUM       153 

marched  easily  through  it  without  using  their 
clubs. 

For  a  week  a  special  force  of  policemen 
guarded  the  Ford  factory,  turning  back  heartsick 
men,  disappointed  in  their  hope  of  a  comfortable 
living  wage. 

It  was  a  graphic  illustration  of  the  harm  done 
the  whole  machine  by  the  loss  of  energy  stored 
in  money,  held  idle  in  the  hands  of  a  few  men. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

MAKING  IT  PAY 

"WHEN  I  saw  thousands  of  men  in  Detroit 
alone  fighting  like  wild  animals  for  a  chance  at  a 
decent  living  wage  it  brought  home  to  me  the  tre 
mendous  economic  waste  in  our  system  of  doing 
business/'  Ford  said.  "Every  man  in  those 
crowds  must  go  back  to  a  job — if  he  found  one 
at  all — that  did  not  give  him  a  chance  to  do  his 
best  work  because  it  did  not  pay  him  enough  to 
keep  him  healthy  and  happy. 

"I  made  up  my  mind  to  put  my  project 
through,  to  prove  to  the  men  who  are  running 
big  industries  that  my  plan  pays.  I  wanted  em 
ployers  to  see  that  when  every  man  has  all  the 
money  he  needs  for  comfort  and  happiness  it 
will  be  better  for  everybody.  I  wanted  to  prove 
that  the  policy  of  trying  to  get  everything  good 
for  yourself  really  hurts  you  in  the  end." 

He  paused  and  smiled  his  slow,  whimsical 
smile. 

"Well,  I  guess  I  proved  it,"  he  said. 

Six  weeks  after  the  plan  went  into  effect  in 
his  factory  a  comparison  was  made  between  the 
production  for  January,  1914,  and  January,  1913. 
In  1913,  with  16,000  men  working  on  the  actual 

154 


MAKING  IT  PAY  155 

production  of  cars  for  ten  hours  a  day,  16,000 
cars  were  made  and  shipped.  Under  the  new 
plan  15,800  men  working  eight  hours  a  day  made 
and  shipped  26,000  cars. 

Again  Ford  had  shown  the  value  of  that  in 
tangible,  "impractical"  thing — a  spirit  of  friend 
liness  and  good  will. 

On  the  ebb  tide  of  the  enthusiasm  which  had 
stirred  this  country  at  the  announcement  of  his 
profit-sharing  plan  a  thousand  skeptical  opinions 
arose.  "Oh,  he's  doing  it  just  for  the  advertis 
ing."  "He  knew,  right  enough,  that  he  would 
make  more  money  in  the  end  by  this  scheme — - 
he's  no  philanthropist." 

Ford  wanted  his  new  plan  known;  he  wanted 
employers  everywhere  to  see  what  he  was  doing, 
how  he  did  it,  and  what  the  effects  would  be.  He 
did  expect  the  factory  to  run  better,  to  produce 
more  cars.  If  it  had  not  done  so  his  plan  would 
have  been  a  failure. 

"Do  the  thing  that  is  best  for  everybody  and 
it  will  be  best  for  you  in  the  end."  That  was  his 
creed.  He  hoped  to  prove  its  truth  so  that  no 
one  would  doubt  it. 

Nor  is  Ford  a  philanthropist,  with  the  ordi 
nary  implications  that  follow  that  word.  He  is  a 
hard-headed,  practical  man,  who  has  made  a  suc 
cess  in  invention,  in  organization,  in  the  building 
of  a  great  business.  His  contribution  to  the 
world  is  a  practical  contribution.  His  message 
is  a  practical  message. 


156     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

"This  whole  world  is  like  a  machine — every 
pa*!  is  as  important  as  every  other  part.  We 
should  all  work  together,  not  against  each  other. 
Anything  that  is  good  for  all  the  parts  of  the 
machine  is  good  for  each  one  of  them. 

"Or  look  at  it  as  a  human  body.  The  welfare 
of  one  part  is  dependent  on  all  the  other  parts. 
Once  in  a  while  a  little  group  of  cells  get  to 
gether  and  takes  to  growing  on  its  own  account, 
not  paying  any  attention  to  the  rest.  That  is  a 
cancer.  In  the  end  what  it  takes  from  the  rest  of 
the  body  causes  the  death  of  the  whole  organism. 
What  do  those  independent,  selfish  cells  get  out 
of  it? 

"I  tell  you,  selfishness,  trying  to  get  ahead  of 
the  other  fellow,  trying  to  take  away  from  other 
people,  is  the  worst  policy  a  man  can  follow.  It 
is  NOT  a  'practical'  viewpoint  on  life.  Any  man 
who  is  a  success  is  a  success  because  his  work  has 
helped  other  men,  whether  he  realizes  it  or  not. 
The  more  he  helps  other  men  the  more  success 
ful  every  one  will  be,  and  he  will  get  his  share." 

Putting  his  profit-sharing  plan  into  effect  was 
not  a  simple  matter  of  writing  the  checks.  He 
had  to  educate  not  only  other  employers,  but  his 
own  men  as  well.  They  must  be  taught  the 
proper  way  to  use  money,  so  that  it  would  not  be 
a  detriment  to  themselves  or  a  menace  to  society 
in  general.  % 

On  the  other  hand,  Ford  did  not  believe  in  the 
factory  systems  in  use  abroad.  He  did  not  mean 


MAKING  IT  PAY  157 

to  give  each  of  his  workmen  a  model  cottage, 
with  a  model  flower  garden  in  front  and  a  model 
laundry  in  the  rear,  and  say  to  them :  "Look  at 
the  flowers,  but  do  not  pick  them;  it  will  spoil 
my  landscape  effect.  Look  at  the  lawn,  but  do 
not  cut  it;  I  have  workmen  for  that." 

He  meant  to  place  no  restraints  on  the  personal 
liberty  of  the  men.  He  believed  that  every  man, 
if  given  the  opportunity,  would  make  himself  a 
good,  substantial  citizen,  industrious,  thrifty  and 
helpful  to  others.  He  meant  his  plan  to  prove 
that  theory  also. 

It  has  been  rumored  that  the  extra  share  of 
profits  was  given  with  "a  string  to  it."  That  is 
not  so.  There  was  no  single  thing  a  man  must 
have  to  do  to  entitle  him  to  his  share.  He  need 
not  own  a  home,  start  a  bank  account,  support  a 
family,  or  even  measure  up  to  a  standard  of  work 
in  the  shops.  Manhood  and  thrift  were  the  only 
requisites,  and  the  company  stood  ready  to  help 
any  man  attain  those. 

The  first  obstacle  was  the  fact  that  55  per  cent 
of  the  men  did  not  speak  English.  Investigators 
visiting  their  miserable  homes  were  obliged  to 
speak  through  interpreters.  A  school  was  started 
where  they  might  learn  English,  and  the  response 
was  touching.  More  than  a  thousand  men  en 
rolled  immediately,  and  when  the  plan  was  dis 
cussed  in  the  shops  200  American  workmen  vol 
unteered  to  help  in  teaching,  so  thoroughly  had 
the  Ford  spirit  of  helpfulness  pervaded  the  fac- 


158     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

tory.  The  paid  teachers  were  dismissed,  and  now 
those  200  men,  on  their  own  time,  are  helping 
their  fellow-employees  to  learn  the  language  of 
their  new  country. 

Shortly  after  the  newspapers  had  carried  far 
and  wide  the  news  of  Ford's  revolutionary  the 
ories  a  man  knocked  late  one  night  at  the  door 
of  the  manager's  home. 

"Will  you  give  me  a  job?"  he  asked. 

"Why,  I  don't  know  who  you  are,"  the  man 
ager  replied. 

"I'm  the  worst  man  in  Detroit,"  said  the  caller 
defiantly.  "I'm  fifty-four  years  old,  and  I've 
done  thirty-two  years  in  Jackson  prison.  I'm  a 
bad  actor,  and  everybody  knows  it.  I  can't  get 
a  job.  The  only  person  that  ever  played  me  true 
is  my  wife,  and  I  ain't  going  to  have  her  taking 
in  washing  to  support  me.  If  you  want  to  give 
me  a  job,  all  right.  If  you  don't  I'm  going  back 
to  Jackson  prison  for  good.  There's  one  man 
yet  I  want  to  get,  and  I'll  get  him." 

Somewhat  nonplussed  by  the  situation  the  man 
ager  invited  the  man  in,  talked  to  him  a  bit,  and 
called  up  Ford. 

"Sure,  give  him  a  chance,"  Ford's  voice  came 
over  the  wire.  "He's  a  man,  isn't  he?  He's  en 
titled  to  as  good  a  chance  as  any  other  man." 

The  ex-convict  was  given  a  job  in  the  shops. 
For  a  couple  of  months  his  work  was  poor.  The 
foreman  reported  it  to  the  manager.  The  man 
ager  wrote  a  letter,  telling  the  man  to  brace  up, 


MAKING  IT  PAY  159 

there  was  plenty  of  good  stuff  in  him  if  he  would 
take  an  interest  in  the  work  and  do  his  best. 

The  next  morning  he  came  into  the  manager's 
office  with  his  wife,  so  broken  up  he  could  hardly 
hold  his  voice  steady.  "That  letter's  the  finest 
thing,  outside  of  what  my  wife  has  done,  that 
I've  ever  had  happen  to  me,"  he  said.  "I  want 
to  stick  here,  I'll  do  the  best  I  know  how.  I'll 
work  my  hands  off.  Show  me  how  to  do  my 
work  better." 

A  couple  of  months  later  he  came  into  the 
office  and  took  a  small  roll  of  bills  out  of  his 
pocket. 

"Say,"  he  said,  shifting  from  one  foot  to  the 
other,  and  running  his  fingers  around  the  brim  of 
the  hat  in  his  hands,  "I  wonder  if  you'd  tell  me 
how  to  get  into  a  bank  and  leave  this  ?  And  what 
bank?  I'm  wise  how  to  get  in  and  take  it  out, 
but  I  ain't  up  to  putting  it  in  without  some  ad 


vice." 


To-day  that  man  is  living  in  his  own  home 
which  he  is  paying  for  on  the  installment  plan, 
and  he  is  one  of  the  best  workers  in  Detroit,  a 
good,  steady  man. 

His  chance  appearance  resulted  in  Ford's  policy 
of  employing  convicts  wherever  his  investigators 
come  across  them.  Nearly  a  hundred  ex-crim 
inals,  many  of  them  on  parole,  are  working  in  his 
shops  to-day,  and  he  considers  them  among  his 
best  men. 
*  "No  policy  is  any  good  if  it  cannot  go  into  a 


160     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

community  and  take  every  one  in  it,  young,  old, 
good,  bad,  sick,  well,  and  make  them  all  happier, 
more  useful  and  more  prosperous,"  he  says. 
"Every  human  being  that  lives  is  part  of  the  big1 
machine,  and  you  can't  draw  any  lines  between 
parts  of  a  machine.  They're  all  important.  You 
can't  make  a  good  machine  by  making  only  one 
part  of  it  good." 

This  belief  led  to  his  establishing  a  unique  labor 
clearing-house  in  his  administration  building — a 
department  that  makes  it  next  to  impossible  for 
any  man  employed  in  the  organization  to  lose  his 
job. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  A  JOB 

THAT  surging  mob  of  men  outside  this  factory 
during  the  week  following  the  announcement  of 
his  profit-sharing  plan  had  impressed  indelibly 
on  Ford's  mind  the  tremendous  importance  of  a 
job. 

"A  workingman's  job  is  his  life,"  he  says.  "No 
one  man  should  have  the  right  ever  to  send 
another  man  home  to  his  family  out  of  work. 
Think  what  it  means  to  that  man,  sitting  there 
at  the  supper  table,  looking  at  his  wife  and  chil 
dren,  and  not  knowing  whether  or  not  he  will  be 
able  to  keep  them  fed  and  clothed. 

"A  normal,  healthy  man  wants  to  work.  He 
has  to  work  to  live  right. "  Nobody  should  be  able 
to  take  his  work  away  from  him.  In  my  factory 
every  man  shall  keep  his  job  as  long  as  he 
wants  it." 

Impractical?  The  idea  seems  fantastic  in  its 
impracticality.  What,  keep  every  man — lazy, 
stupid,  impudent,  dishonest,  as  he  may  be — every 
man  in  a  force  of  18,000  workmen,  on  the  pay 
roll  as  long  as  he  wants  to  stay  ?  Surely,  if  there 
is  any  point  at  which  ideals  of  human  brother- 
161 


1 62     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

hood  end  and  coldblooded  business  methods  begin, 
this  should  be  that  point. 

But  Ford,  obstinate  in  his  determination  to 
care  for  the  interests  of  every  one,  declared  that 
this  policy  should  stand.  As  a  part  of  his  new 
plan,  he  installed  the  labor  clearing  house  as 
part  of  his  employment  department. 

Now  when  a  foreman  discharges  a  man,  that 
man  is  not  sent  out  of  the  factory.  He  goes  with 
a  written  slip  from  the  foreman  to  the  labor  clear 
ing  house.  There  he  is  questioned.  What  is 
wrong?  Is  he  ill?  Does  he  dislike  his  work? 
What  are  his  real  interests  ? 

In  the  end  he  is  transferred  to  another  depart 
ment  which  seems  more  suited  to  his  taste  and 
abilities.  If  he  proves  unsatisfactory  there,  he 
returns  again  to  the  clearing  house.  Again  his 
case  is  discussed,  again  he  is  given  another  chance 
in  still  another  department.  Meantime  the  em 
ployment  managers  take  an  active  interest  in  him, 
in  his  health,  his  home  conditions,  his  friends. 
He  is  made  to  feel  that  he  has  friends  in  the  man 
agement  who  are  eager  to  help  him  make  the 
right  start  to  the  right  kind  of  life. 

Perhaps  he  is  ill.  Then  he  is  sent  to  the  com 
pany  hospital,  given  medical  care  and  a  leave  of 
absence  until  he  is  well  enough  to  resume  work. 

Over  200  cases  of  tuberculosis  in  various  stages 
were  discovered  among  Ford's  employees  when 
his  hospital  was  established.  These  men  pre 
sented  a  peculiar  problem.  Most  of  them  were 


THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  A  JOB     163 

still  able  to  work,  all  of  them  must  continue  work 
ing  to  support  families.  Yet,  if  their  cases  were 
neglected  it  meant  not  only  their  own  deaths,  but 
spreading  infection  in  the  factory. 

The  business  world  has  never  attempted  to 
solve  the  problem  of  these  men.  Waste  from  the 
great  machine,  they  are  thrown  carelessly  out, 
unable  because  of  that  tell-tale  cough  to  get  an 
other  job,  left  to  shift  for  themselves  in  a  world 
which  thinks  it  does  not  need  them. 

Ford  established  a  "heat-treating  department" 
especially  for  them.  When  the  surgeons  discover 
a  case  of  incipient  tuberculosis  in  the  Ford  fac 
tory,  they  transfer  the  man  to  this  department, 
where  the  air,  filtered,  dried  and  heated,  is  scien 
tifically  better  for  their  disease  than  the  mountain 
climate  of  Denver.  Here  the  men  are  given  light 
jobs  which  they  can  handle,  and  paid  their  regular 
salaries  until  they  are  cured  and  able  to  return  to 
their  former  places  in  the  shops. 

"It's  better  for  everybody  when  a  man  stays 
at  work,  instead  of  laying  off,"  Ford  says.  "I 
don't  care  what's  wrong  with  him,  whether  he's 
a  misfit  in  his  department,  or  stupid,  or  sick. 
There's  always  some  way  to  keep  him  doing  use 
ful  work.  And  as  long  as  he  is  doing  that  it's 
better  for  the  man  and  for  the  company,  and  for 
the  world. 

"And  yet  there  are  men  in  business  to-day 
who  install  systems  to  prevent  the  waste  of  a 
piece  of  paper  or  a  stamp,  and  let  the  human  labor 


1 64     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

in  their  plants  go  to  waste  wholesale.  Yes,  and 
they  sat  up  and  said  I  was  a  sentimental  idiot 
when  I  put  in  my  system  of  taking  care  of  the 
men  in  my  place.  They  said  it  would  not  pay. 
Well,  let  them  look  over  the  books  of  the  Ford 
factory  and  see  how  it  paid — how  it  paid  all 
of  us." 

Five  months  after  Ford's  new  plans  had  gone 
into  effect  his  welfare  workers  made  a  second 
survey. 

Eleven  hundred  men  had  moved  to  better 
homes.  Bank  deposits  had  increased  205  per 
cent.  Twice  as  many  men  owned  their  own 
homes.  More  than  two  million  dollars'  worth 
of  Detroit  real  estate  had  passed  into  the  hands 
of  Ford  employees,  who  were  paying  for  it  on 
the  installment  plan.  Among  the  18,000  work 
men  only  140  still  lived  in  conditions  which  could 
be  called  "bad"  in  the  reports. 

And  the  output  of  Ford  automobiles  had  in 
creased  over  20  per  cent. 

That  year,  with  an  eight-hour  day  in  force,  and 
$10,000,000  divided  in  extra  profits  among  the 
men,  the  factory  produced  over  100,000  more  cars 
than  it  had  produced  during  the  preceding  year, 
under  the  old  conditions. 

Cold  figures  had  proved  to  the  business  world 
the  "practical"  value  of  "sentimental  theories." 
Ford's  policy  had  not  only  done  away  with  the 
labor  problem,  it  had  also  shown  the  way  to  solve 
the  employers'  problems. 


THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  A  JOB     165 

"The  heart  of  the  struggle  between  capital 
and  labor  is  the  idea  of  employer  and  employee," 
he  says.  "There  ought  not  to  be  employers  and 
workmen — just  workmen.  They're  two  parts  of 
the  same  machine.  It's  absurd  to  have  a  machine 
in  which  one  part  tries  to  foil  another. 

"My  job  at  the  plant  is  to  design  the  cars  and 
keep  the  departments  working  in  harmony.  I'm 
a  workman.  I'm  not  trying  to  slip  anything  over 
on  the  other  factors  in  the  machine.  How  would 
that  help  the  plant? 

"There's  trouble  between  labor  and  capital. 
Well,  the  solution  is  not  through  one  side  getting 
the  other  by  the  neck  and  squeezing.  No,  sir; 
that  isn't  a  solution;  that  is  ruin  for  both.  It 
means  that  later  the  other  side  is  going  to  recover 
and  try  to  get  on  top  again,  and  there'll  be  con 
stant  fighting  and  jarring  where  there  ought  to 
be  harmony  and  adjustment. 

"The  only  solution  is  to  GET  TOGETHER.  It 
can't  come  only  by  the  demands  of  labor.  It  can't 
come  only  by  the  advantages  of  capital.  It's  got 
to  come  by  both  recognizing  their  interest  and 
getting  together. 

"That's  the  solution  of  all  the  problems  in  the 
world,  as  I  see  it.  Let  people  realize  that  they're 
all  bound  together,  all  parts  of  one  machine,  and 
that  nothing  that  hurts  one  group  of  people  will 
fail  in  the  end  to  come  back  and  hurt  all  the  peo- 
pie." 

So,  at  the  end  of  thirty-seven  years  of  work, 


1 66     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

Henry  Ford  sat  in  his  office  on  his  fifty-second 
birthday  and  looked  out  of  a  community  of 
nearly  20,000  persons,  working  efficiently  and 
happily  together,  working  for  him  and  for  them 
selves,  well  paid,  contented.  He  thought  of  the 
world,  covered  with  the  network  of  his  agencies, 
crossed  and  recrossed  with  the  tracks  of  his  cars. 

He  had  run  counter  to  'every  prompting  of 
"practical  business  judgment"  all  his  life — he  had 
left  the  farm,  built  his  engine,  left  the  moneyed 
men  who  would  not  let  him  build  a  cheap  car, 
started  his  own  plant  on  insufficient  capital,  built 
up  his  business,  established  his  profit-sharing 
scheme — all  against  every  dictate  of  established 
practice. 

He  had  acted  from  the  first  on  that  one  funda 
mental  principle,  "Do  the  thing  that  means  the 
most  good  to  the  most  people."  His  car,  his  fac 
tory,  his  workmen,  his  sixty  millions  of  dollars, 
answered  conclusively  the  objection,  "I  know  it's 
the  right  thing,  theoretically — but  it  isn't  practi 
cal." 

Thinking  of  these  things  on  that  bright  sum 
mer  day  in  1914,  Ford  decided  that  there  re 
mained  only  one  more  thing  he  could  do. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

A  GREAT  EDUCATIONAL  INSTITUTION 

IT  happened  that  on  Ford's  fifty-second  birth 
day  a  commission  from  the  French  Chamber  of 
Commerce  arrived  in  Detroit,  having  crossed  the 
Atlantic  to  inspect  the  Ford  factories. 

They  viewed  276  acres  of  manufacturing  activ 
ity ;  the  largest  power  plant  in  the  world,  develop- 
ing  45,000  horse-power  from  gas-steam  engines 
designed  by  Ford  engineers ;  the  enormous  forty- 
ton  cranes;  6,000  machines  in  operation  in  one 
great  room,  using  fifty  miles  of  leather  belting; 
nine  mono-rail  cars,  each  with  two-ton  hoists, 
which  carry  materials — in  short,  the  innumerable 
details  of  that  mammoth  plant. 

Then  they  inspected  the  hospitals,  the  rest 
rooms,  noted  the  daylight  construction  of  the 
whole  plant,  the  ventilating  system  which  changes 
the  air  completely  every  ten  minutes,  the  labor- 
saving  devices,  the  "safety-first"  equipment. 

At  last  they  returned  to  Henry  Ford's  office, 
with  notebooks  full  of  figures  and  information  to 
be  taken  to  the  manufacturers  of  France.  They 
thanked  Ford  for  his  courtesy  and  assured  him 
that  they  comprehended  every  detail  of  his  poli 
cies  save  one. 

167 


1 68     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

"We  find,  sir,"  said  the  spokesman,  courteously, 
"that  last  year  you  had  more  orders  than  you 
could  fill.  Is  it  not  so?" 

"Yes,  that  is  correct,"  replied  Ford.  "But  with 
the  increased  output  this  year  we  hope  to  catch 
up." 

"And  yet,  is  it  not  so  that  this  spring  you  low 
ered  the  price  of  your  car  fifty  dollars?" 

"Yes,  that  is  true,"  said  Ford. 

"But,  sir,  we  cannot  understand — is  it  then  true 
that  you  reduce  your  prices  when  already  you 
have  more  orders  than  you  can  fill  ?  This  seems 
strange  to  us,  indeed.  Why  should  a  manufac 
turer  do  that?" 

"Well,"  Ford  answered,  "I  and  my  family  al 
ready  have  all  the  money  we  can  possibly  use. 
We  don't  need  any  more.  And  I  think  an  auto 
mobile  is  a  good  thing.  I  think  every  man  should 
be  able  to  own  one.  I  want  to  keep  lowering  the 
price  until  my  car  is  within  the  reach  of  every  one 
in  America.  You  see,  that  is  all  I  know  how  to 
do  for  my  country." 

Unconsciously,  he  was  voicing  the  new  patriot 
ism — 'the  ideal  to  which  he  was  to  give  the  rest 
of  his  life.  He  said  it  simply,  a  little  awkwardly, 
but  the  French  commission,  awed  by  the  greatness 
of  this  Detroit  manufacturer,  returned  and  re 
ported  his  statement  to  the  French  people  as  the 
biggest  thing  they  had  found  in  America. 

Yet  this  viewpoint  was  the  natural  outcome  of 
his  life.  A  simple  man,  seeing  things  simply,  he 


EDUCATIONAL  INSTITUTION     169 

had  arrived  at  a  place  of  tremendous  power  in 
America.  He  had  come  to  a  time  when  he  need 
no  longer  work  at  his  engine  or  his  factory  or 
ganization.  He  had  leisure  to  survey  his  country 
and  its  problems,  to  apply  to  them  his  machine 
idea. 

And  he  saw  in  America  a  great  machine,  made 
up  of  countless  human  parts — a  machine  which 
should  work  evenly,  efficiently,  harmoniously,  for 
the  production  and  just  distribution  of  food,  shel 
ter,  clothes,  all  the  necessities  of  a  simple  and 
comfortable  life. 

His  part,  as  he  saw  it,  was  to  make  and  dis 
tribute  automobiles.  He  meant  to  do  his  part 
in  the  best  way  he  knew  how,  hoping  by  his  suc 
cess  to  hasten  the  time  when  every  one  would 
follow  his  example,  and  all  the  terrible  friction 
and  waste  of  our  present  system  would  be  stopped. 

This  was  his  only  interest  in  life.  A  farmer- 
boy  mechanic,  who  had  left  school  at  sixteen, 
who  had  lived  all  his  life  among  machines,  in 
terested  in  practical  things,  he  saw  no  value  in 
anything  which  did  not  promote  the  material 
well-being  of  the  people.  Art — music,  painting, 
literature,  architecture — luxuries,  super-refine 
ments  of  living,  these  things  seemed  useless  to 
him. 

"Education?     Come  to  Detroit  and  I'll  show 

you  the  biggest  school  in  the  world,"  he  says. 

•/"Every  man  there  is  learning  and  going  ahead 

all  the  time.    They're  realizing  that  their  interests 


170     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

are  the  same  as  their  employer's,  that  he  is  the 
men's  trustee,  that  he  is  only  one  of  the  workmen 
with  a  job  of  his  own,  and  that  his  job,  like  the 
jobs  of  the  others,  has  to  be  run  for  the  good 
of  the  whole  plant.  He  would  fire  a  man  who 
took  away  from  the  other  men  for  his  own  ad 
vantage.  That  spirit  would  harm  the  works. 
Similarly,  the  men  would  have  a  right  to  fire  him 
if  he  took  away  from  them  for  his  personal 
benefit. 

"The  men  in  my  plant  are  learning  these  things. 
They're  leading  the  way  for  the  workers  of  this 
country.  They  are  going  to  show  other  workers, 
just  as  I  hope  to  show  other  employers,  that 
things  should  be  run  for  the  most  good  for  the 
most  people.  That's  the  education  we  need. 

"This  education  outside  of  industry  that  we 
have  to-day  is  just  the  perpetuation  of  tradition 
and  convention.  It's  a  good  deal  of  a  joke  and 
a  good  deal  of  waste  motion.  To  my  mind,  the 
usefulness  of  a  school  ends  when  it  has  taught 
a  man  to  read  and  write  and  figure,  and  has 
brought  out  his  capacity  for  being  interested  in 
his  line.  After  that,  let  the  man  or  boy  get  after 
what  he  is  interested  in,  and  get  after  it  with  all 
his  might,  and  keep  going  ahead — that  is  school. 

"If  those  young  fellows  who  are  learning  chem 
istry  in  colleges  were  enough  interested  in  chem 
istry  they  would  learn  it  the  way  I  did,  in  my  little 
back  shed  of  nights.  I  would  not  give  a  plugged 


EDUCATIONAL  INSTITUTION     171 

nickel  for  all  the  higher  education  and  all  the  art 
in  the  world." 

This,  then,  was  Henry  Ford  at  52.  A  slender, 
slightly  stooped  man,  with  hollow  cheeks,  thin, 
firm,  humorous  lips,  gray  hair ;  a  man  with  sixty 
odd  millions  of  dollars;  used  to  hard  work  all  his 
life,  and  liking  it.  A  man  who  on  a  single  idea 
had  built  up  a  tremendous  organization,  so  sys 
tematized  that  it  ran  by  itself,  requiring  little  su 
pervision. 

In  some  way  he  must  use  his  driving  energy, 
in  some  way  he  must  spend  his  millions,  and  his 
nature  demanded  that  he  do  it  along  the  line  of 
that  idea  which  had  dominated  his  whole  life — 
the  machine  idea  of  humanity,  the  idea  of  the 
greatest  good  to  the  greatest  number. 

That  summer,  for  the  first  time,  he  found  him 
self  with  leisure.  He  was  not  imperatively 
needed  at  the  plant.  He  and  Mrs.  Ford  spent 
some  time  in  Greenfield,  where  he  enlarged  the 
old  farm  by  purchasing  nearly  four  thousand 
acres  of  land  adjoining  it.  He  himself  spent 
some  time  on  the  problems  of  organizing  the 
work  on  those  acres.  He  and  his  wife  lived  in 
the  house  where  they  had  begun  their  married 
life,  and  where,  with  their  old  furniture  and  their 
old  friends,  they  reconstructed  the  life  of  thirty 
years  before. 

Ford  returned  to  Detroit  with  a  working  model 
for  a  cheap  farm-tractor  which  he  intends  to  put 
on  the  market  soon.  He  worked  out  the  designs 


172     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

and  dropped  them  into  the  roaring  cogs  of  his 
organization  which  presently  produced  some 
dozens  of  the  tractors.  These  were  sent  down  to 
the  farm  and  put  to  work.  In  due  course,  caught 
up  again  by  the  Ford  organization,  the  tractors 
will  begin  to  pour  out  in  an  endless  stream  and 
Ford  will  have  done  for  farm  work  what  he  did 
for  passenger  traffic. 

But  he  realized  that  those  occupations  did  not 
absorb  his  whole  energy.  Unconsciously  he  was 
seeking  something  bigger  even  than  his  factories, 
than  his  business  operations,  to  which  he  could 
devote  his  mind — 'something  to  which  he  could 
apply  his  ruling  idea,  something  for  which  he 
could  fight. 

The  terrible  4th  of  August,  1914,  which 
brought  misery,  ruin,  desolation  to  Europe  and 
panic  to  the  whole  world,  gave  him  his  oppor 
tunity. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

THE   EUROPEAN   WAR 

WAR!  The  news  caught  at  the  heart  of  the 
world,  and  stopped  it. 

For  a  time  the  whole  business  structure  of 
every  nation  on  earth  trembled,  threatened  to 
crumble  into  ruin,  under  this  weight,  to  which 
it  had  been  building  from  the  beginning. 

Greed,  grasping  selfishness,  a  policy  of  "each 
man  for  himself,  against  other  men,"  these  are 
the  foundations  on  which  nations  have  built  up 
their  commercial,  social,  industrial  success.  These 
are  the  things  which  always  have  led,  and  always 
will  lead,  to  war,  to  the  destruction  of  those  struc 
tures  they  have  built. 

Austria,  Germany,  France,  Belgium,  Russia, 
England,  Japan,  Turkey,  Italy — one  by  one  they 
crashed  down  into  the  general  wreck.  Every 
thing  good  that  the  centuries  had  made  was  bur 
ied  in  the  debris.  The  world  rocked  under  the 
shock. 

Here  in  America  we  read  the  reports  in  dazed 
incredulity.  It  could  not  be  possible,  it  could  not 
be  possible,  we  said  to  each  other  with  white  lips 
— in  this  age,  now,  to-day — 

For,  living  as  most  of  us  do,  on  the  surface  of 
173 


174     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

things,  among  our  friends,  in  an  atmosphere  of 
kindliness  and  helpfulness,  we  had  been  cheer 
fully  unconcerned  about  the  foundations  of  our 
economic  and  industrial  life. 

In  the  winter  there  are  thousands  of  unem 
ployed  men — <we  try  to  give  each  one  a  bowl  of 
soup,  a  place  to  sleep.  Our  street  corners  are 
unpleasantly  infested  with  beggars — we  pass  an 
ordinance,  arrest  them  for  vagrancy,  feed  them 
a  few  days  and  order  them  to  leave  town.  The 
city  is  full  of  criminals — what  are  the  police  do 
ing  ?  we  inquire  testily.  We  build  another  prison, 
erect  another  gallows. 

We  are  like  an  architect  who,  seeing  threaten 
ing  cracks  in  the  walls  of  the  building,  would  hur 
riedly  fill  them  with  putty  and  add  another  story. 

Henry  Ford  read  the  news  from  Europe.  He 
saw  there  a  purposeless,  useless  and  waste  of 
everything  valuable.  He  saw  a  machine,  wrongly 
built  for  centuries  so  that  each  part  would  work 
against  all  the  other  parts,  suddenly  set  in  mo 
tion  and  wrecking  itself. 

It  was  a  repetition,  on  a  larger  scale,  of  a  ca 
tastrophe  with  which  he  had  been  familiar  in  the 
business  world.  How  many  companies  in  his 
own  field  had  been  organized  in  the  early  days  of 
the  industry,  had  gone  into  business  with  the  one 
purpose  of  getting  all  they  could  from  every  one, 
workers,  stockholders,  buyers — and  had  gone 
down  in  ruin !  Only  those  companies  which  had 
been  built  on  some  basis  of  fair  service  had  sue- 


THE  EUROPEAN  WAR  175 

ceeded,  and  these  had  done  so  in  proportion  to 
their  real  value  to  others.  Whether  or  not  this 
principle  is  recognized  by  those  who  profit  from 
it,  it  is  the  fundamental  principle  on  which  busi 
ness  success  is  built. 

"The  trouble  is  that  people  do  not  see  that," 
said  Ford.  "A  man  goes  into  business  from 
purely  selfish  motives;  he  works  for  himself,  and 
against  every  one  else,  as  far  as  he  can.  But 
only  so  far  as  his  grasping  selfishness  really  works 
out  in  benefit  to  other  people  he  succeeds.  If 
he  knew  that,  if  he  went  to  work  deliberately  to 
help  other  people,  he  would  do  more  good,  and  at 
the  same  time  he  would  make  a  bigger  success  for 
himself. 

"But  instead  of  that,  he  gets  more  and  more 
selfish.  When  he  has  got  a  lot  of  money,  and  be 
comes  a  real  power,  he  uses  his  power  selfishly. 
He  thinks  it  is  his  grasping  policy  that  has  made 
him  successful.  Why,  everything  I  ever  did 
selfishly  in  my  life  has  come  back  like  a  boom 
erang  and  hurt  me  more  than  it  hurt  any  one 
else,  and  the  same  way  with  everything  I  have 
done  to  help  others.  It  helps  me  in  the  end  every 
time.  It  is  bound  to.  As  long  as  a  machine  runs, 
anything  that  is  really  good  for  one  part  is  good 
for  the  whole  machine. 

"Look  at  those  fighting  nations.  Every  one 
of  them  is  hurting  itself  as  much  as  it  hurts  the 
enemy.  Their  success  was  founded  on  the  fact 
that  they  have  helped  each  other.  England  got 


1 76     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

her  dyes  and  her  tools  and  her  toys  from  Ger 
many;  Germany  got  her  wheat  from  Russia,  and 
her  fruits  and  olives  from  Italy ;  Turkey  got  her 
ships  from  England.  They  were  all  helping  each 
other.  Their  real  interests — the  comfort  and 
happiness  of  their  people — were  all  one  interest. 

"Left  to  themselves,  the  real  German  people 
would  never  fight  the  French  people,  never  in  the 
world.  No  more  than  Iowa  would  fight  Michi 
gan.  Race  differences?  They  do  not  exist  in 
sufficient  degree  to  make  men  fight,  and  they  are 
disappearing  every  day.  See  how  the  races  mix 
in  America!  I  have  fifty-three  nationalities, 
speaking  more  than  one  hundred  different  lan 
guages  and  dialects,  in  my  shops,  and  they  never 
have  any  trouble.  They  realize  that  their  in 
terests  are  all  the  same. 

"What  is  the  root  of  the  whole  question?  The 
real  interests  of  all  men  are  the  same — work, 
food  and  shelter,  and  happiness.  When  they  all 
work  together  for  those,  every  one  will  have 
plenty. 

"What  do  people  fight  for?  Does  fighting 
make  more  jobs,  better  homes,  more  to  eat?  No. 
People  fight  because  they  are  taught  that  the  only 
way  to  get  these  things  is  to  take  them  from 
some  one  else.  The  common  people,  the  people 
who  lose  most  by  fighting,  don't  know  what  they 
are  fighting  for.  They  fight  because  they  are 
told  to.  What  do  they  get  out  of  it?  Disgust, 


THE  EUROPEAN  WAR  177 

shame,  grief,  wounds,  death,  ruin,  starvation. 
War  is  the  most  hideous  waste  in  the  world." 

In  the  first  terrible  months  of  the  war  the 
American  people,  in  horror,  echoed  that  opinion. 
With  the  spectacle  of  half  the  world  in  bloody 
ruins  before  our  eyes,  we  recoiled.  We  thanked 
God  that  our  country  remained  sane.  We  saw  a 
vision  of  America,  after  the  madness  had  passed, 
helping  to  bind  up  the  wounds  of  Europe,  help 
ing  to  make  a  permanent  peace  which  should 
bring  the  people  of  the  earth  together  in  one  fra 
ternity. 

By  degrees  that  feeling  began  to  change.  We 
want  peace.  Are  there  a  hundred  men  among 
our  hundred  million  who  will  say  they  want  war 

for  war's  sake?  We  want  peace — but We 

have  begun  to  ask  that  old  question,  "Is  it  prac 
tical?"  That  vision  of  the  people  of  the  world 
working  together,  increasing  their  own  happiness 
and  comfort  by  helping  to  make  happiness  and 
comfort  for  each  other — it  is  a  beautiful  theory, 
but  is  it  not  a  bit  sentimental?  a  bit  visionary? 
just  a  little  too  good  to  be  true? 

"Here  is  a  world  where  war  happens,"  we 
say.  "If  a  war  should  happen  to  us  what  would 
we  do?  Let  us  begin  to  prepare  for  war.  Let 
us  take  war  into  our  calculations.  Let  us  be 
practical." 

And  Henry  Ford,  reading  the  papers,  listen 
ing  to  the  talk  of  the  men  in  the  streets,  saw  the 
object  lesson  of  his  great  organization  disre- 


178     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

garded.  He  heard  again  the  objection  which  had 
met  every  step  of  his  life.  "It  is  a  good  idea, 
but  it  is  theoretical.  It  is  not  practical.  It  will  not 
work.  Things  never  have  done  that  way."  He 
saw  this  country,  already  wasting  incalculable 
human  energy,  destroying  innumerable  lives 
daily,  because  of  a  "practical"  system  of  organi 
zation,  preparing  to  drain  off  still  more  energy, 
still  greater  wealth,  in  preparation  for  a  still  more 
terrible  waste. 

The  dearest  principle  of  his  life,  the  principle 
whose  truth  he  had  proven  through  a  life  of  hard 
work,  was  in  danger  of  being  swept  away  and 
forgotten. 


CHAPTER  XXX 

THE  BEST  PREPAREDNESS 

HENRY  FORD  saw  that  the  meaning1  of  his 
work  was  about  to  be  lost.  He  was  in  for  the 
greatest  fight  of  his  life. 

He  counted  his  resources.  The  mammoth  fac 
tory  was  still  running  to  capacity,  the  farm- 
tractors,  which  would  mean  so  much  in  increased 
production  of  food,  in  greater  comforts  for  mil 
lions  of  farmers,  were  almost  ready  to  be  put  on 
the  market.  His  plan  for  profit-sharing  with  the 
buyers  of  his  cars  had  recently  been  announced. 
Three  hundred  thousand  men  in  this  country 
would  have,  during  1915,  an  actual  proof  in  dol 
lars  and  cents  of  the  practical  value  of  coopera 
tion,  of  Ford's  principle"  that  "helping  the  other 
fellow  will  help  you."  Those  men  would  share 
with  him  the  profit  which  would  add  still  more 
millions  to  his  credit. 

Ford  had  these  things;  he  had  also  a  tre 
mendous  fortune  at  his  command.  He  cast  about 
for  \vays  of  using  that  fortune  in  this  fight,  and 
again  the  uselessness  of  money  was  impressed 
upon  him. 

"Money  is  of  no  real  value  whatever/'  he  says. 
"What  can  I  do  with  it  now?  I  cannot  pay  a 
179 


i8o     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

man  enough  to  make  him  change  his  real  opin 
ions.  The  only  real  resource  this  country  has 
now  is  the  intelligence  of  our  people.  They  must 
think  right,  they  must  know  the  true  principles 
on  which  to  build  a  great,  strong  nation. 

"They  must  hold  firm  to  the  big,  true  things, 
and  realize — some  way  they  must  be  MADE  to 
realize — that  they  are  practical,  that  ideals  are 
the  only  practical  things  in  this  world. 

"It  is  to  everybody's  interest  to  do  right.  Not 
in  the  next  world,  nor  in  a  spiritual  way  only, 
but  in  good,  hard  dollars-and-cents  business 
value. 

"Let's  be  practical.  Suppose  we  do  prepare  for 
war?  Suppose  we  do  take  the  energies  of  our 
young  men  and  spend  them  in  training  for  war. 
Our  country  needs  the  whole  energy  of  every  man 
in  productive  work,  work  that  will  make  more 
food,  more  clothing,  better  houses.  But  suppose 
we  turn  that  energy  from  real  uses,  train  it  to 
destroy,  instead  of  to  create?  Suppose  we  have 
half  a  million  young  men  ready  to  fight?  What 
weapons  shall  we  give  them  ? 

"Shall  we  give  them  guns?  They  will  be  out 
of  date.  Shall  we  give  them  poisonous  gases, 
or  disease  germs,  or  shall  we  invent  something 
even  more  horrible?  As  fast  as  we  make  these 
things,  other  nations  will  make  worse  ones. 

"Shall  we  turn  our  factories  into  munition 
plants  ?  Shall  we  build  dreadnoughts  ?  The  sub 
marine  destroys  them.  Shall  we  build  sub- 


THE  BEST  PREPAREDNESS       181 

marines  ?  Other  nations  will  make  submarine- 
destroyers.  Shall  we  build  submarine  destroy 
ers?  Other  nations  will  build  war-aeroplanes  to 
destroy  them.  We  must  make  something  worse 
than  the  aeroplanes,  and  something  worse  still, 
and  then  something  still  more  horrible,  bidding 
senselessly  up  and  up  and  up,  spending  millions 
on  millions,  trying  to  outdo  other  nations  which 
are  trying  to  outdo  us. 

"For  if  we  begin  to  prepare  for  war  we  must 
not  stop.  We  can  not  stop.  I  read  articles  in  the 
magazines  saying  that  we  might  as  well  have  no 
navy  at  all  as  the  one  we  have;  that  we  might 
as  well  have  no  army  as  the  army  we  have,  if 
this  country  should  be  invaded.  Yet  we  have 
already  spent  millions  on  that  army  and  that 
navy.  Let  us  spend  millions  more,  and  more 
millions,  and  more,  and  still,  unless  we  keep  on 
spending  more  than  any  other  nation  can  spend, 
we  might  as  well  have  no  army  or  navy  at  all. 

"And  yet  there  are  people  who  think  that  to 
begin  such  a  course  is  'practical,'  is  good  com 
mon  sense! 

"I  tell  you,  the  only  real  strength  of  a  nation 
is  the  spirit  of  its  people.  The  only  real,  prac 
tical  value  in  the  world  is  the  spirit  of  the  people 
of  the  world.  There  were  animals  on  the  earth 
ages  ago  who  could  kill  a  hundred  men  with  one 
sweep  of  a  paw,  but  they  are  gone,  and  we  sur 
vive.  Why?  Because  men  have  minds,  because 


1 82     HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORY 

they  use  their  minds  in  doing  useful  things,  mak 
ing  food,  and  clothes,  and  shelters. 

"A  few  hundred  years  ago  no  man  was  safe 
on  the  street  alone  at  night.  No  woman  was 
safe  unless  she  had  a  man  with  her  who  was 
strong  enough  to  kill  other  men.  We  have 
changed  all  that.  How  ?  By  force  ?  No,  because 
we  have  learned  in  a  small  degree  that  there  are 
things  better  than  force.  We  have  learned  that 
to  look  out  for  the  interests  of  every  one  in 
our  community  is  best  for  us  in  the  end. 

"Let  us  realize  that  to  think  of  the  welfare  of 
the  whole  world  is  best  for  each  one  of  us.  We 
do  not  carry  a  gun  so  that  if  we  meet  an  Eng 
lishman  on  the  street  and  he  attacks  us  we  can 
kill  him.  We  know  he  does  not  want  to  kill  us. 

"We  know  that  the  real  people  of  the  whole 
world  do  not  want  war.  We  do  not  want  war. 
There  are  only  a  few  people  who  think  they  want 
war — the  politicians,  the  rulers,  the  Big  Busi 
ness  men,  who  think  they  can  profit  by  it.  War 
injures  everybody  else,  and  in  the  end  it  injures 
them,  too. 

"The  way  to  handle  the  war  question  is  not  to 
waste  more  and  more  human  energy  in  getting 
ready  to  hurt  the  other  fellow.  We  must  get 
down  to  the  foundations ;  we  must  realize  that 
the  interests  of  all  the  people  are  one,  and  that 
what  hurts  one  hurts  us  all. 

"We  must  know  that,  and  we  must  have  the 
courage  to  act  on  it.  A  nation  of  a  hundred  mil- 


THE  BEST  PREPAREDNESS       183 

lion  people,  of  all  nationalities  and  races,  we  must 
work  together,  each  of  us  doing  what  he  can  for 
the  best  good  of  the  whole.  Then  we  can  show 
Europe,  when  at  last  her  crippled  people  drag 
themselves  back  to  their  ruined  homes,  that  a 
policy  of  peace  and  hopefulness  does  pay,  that 
it  is  practical. 

"We  can  show  them  that  we  do  mean  to  help 
them.  They  will  believe  it,  if  we  do  not  say  it 
behind  a  gun. 

"If  we  carry  a  gun,  we  must  depend  on  the 
gun  to  save  our  nation.  We  must  frankly  say 
that  we  believe  in  force  and  nothing  else.  We 
must  admit  that  human  brotherhood  and  ideals 
of  mutual  good  will  and  helpfulness  are  sec 
ondary  to  power  and  willingness  to  commit  mur 
der;  that  only  a  murderer  at  heart  can  afford  to 
have  them.  We  must  abandon  every  principle  on 
which  our  country  was  founded,  every  inch  of 
progress  we  have  made  since  men  were  frankly 
beasts. 

"But  if  our  country  is  not  to  go  down  as  all 
nations  have  gone  before  her,  depending  on  force 
and  destroyed  by  force,  we  must  build  on  a  firm 
foundation.  We  must  build  on  our  finest,  big 
gest  instincts.  We  must  go  fearlessly  ahead, 
not  looking  back,  and  put  our  faith  in  the  things 
which  endure,  and  which  have  grown  stronger 
through  every  century  of  history. 

"Democracy,  every  man's  right  to  comfort  and 
plenty  and  happiness,  human  brotherhood,  mu- 


1 84    HENRY  FORD'S  OWN  STORx 

tual  helpfulness — these  are  the  real,  practical 
things.  These  are  the  things  on  which  we  can 
build,  surely  and  firmly.  These  are  the  things 
which  will  last.  These  are  the  things  which  will 
pay. 

"I  have  proved  them  over  and  over  again  in 
my  own  life.  Other  men,  so  far  as  they  have 
trusted  themjjiave  proved  them.  America  has 
built  on  thenffne  richest,  most  successful  nation 
in  the  world  to-day.  Just  so  far  as  we  continue 
to  trust  them,  to  build  on  them,  we  will  continue 
to  be  prosperous  and  successful. 

"I  know  this.  If  my  life  has  taught  me  any 
thing  at  all,  it  has  taught  me  that.  I  will  spend 
every  ounce  of  energy  I  have,  every  hour  of  my 
life,  in  the  effort  to  prove  it  to  other  people. 
Only  so  far  as  we  all  believe  it,  only  so  far  as 
we  all  use  our  strength  and  our  abilities,  not  to 
hurt,  but  to  help,  other  peoples,  will  we  help  our 
selves/' 

This  is  the  end  of  my  story,  and  the  beginning 
of  Henry  Ford's  biggest  fight, 


THE  END 


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